Andrew Feenberg
Heidegger and Marcuse
We are several hundred years into the project of
Enlightenment, initiated in the 18th Century by thinkers who believed in
progress. We are the heirs of that project, which freed science and technology
for the adventure of modernity. This has made all the difference. No doubt
human nature remains the same as always, but the means at our disposal are now
much more powerful than in the past. Quantity has changed into quality as
innovations alter the basic parameters of human action. New dilemmas emerge in
a society reconstructed around these new technical means.
Two philosophers have reflected most deeply on this situation. Martin Heidegger invites us to study technology as the decisive philosophical issue of our time. Most philosophers either celebrate technical progress or worry about its unintended consequences, and so conceive society as separate from technology, which holds either a promise or a threat for the future. Heidegger, on the contrary, defines modernity itself as the prevalence of technology. Particular technical achievements and failures are unimportant since our very dependence on technology gives rise to general catastrophe. Heidegger's student, Herbert Marcuse, reformulated the philosophy of technology in the framework of a radical social theory and projected solutions to the problems Heidegger identified. For Marcuse technology is a still in evolution; it is not a fixed destiny as it is for Heidegger. The promise of Enlightenment remains to be fulfilled in a future stage of that evolution through a deep transformation of technology. Together, these two philosophers offer the deepest insight into the danger of technology and the possibilities of redemption.
Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is a puzzling combination of romantic nostalgia for an idealized image of antiquity and deep insight into modernity. His originality lies in treating technique not merely as a functional means but as a mode of “revealing” through which a “world” is shaped. “World” in Heidegger refers not to the sum of existent things but to an ordered and meaningful structure of experience. Such structures depend on basic practices characterizing societies and whole historical eras. These constitute an “opening” in which “Being” is revealed, that is to say, in which experience takes place. Human being, called “Dasein” by Heidegger, can only be understood as always already involved in a world in this sense. As such it is “being-in-the-world.” The things of the world are “revealed” to Dasein as they are encountered in use and so Heidegger calls them “equipment” (Zeug).
This picture of Dasein’s being-in-the-world is obscured in modern times by technological thinking which treats everything as an objective matter of fact, including human beings themselves. Heidegger argues that today reality is fundamentally restructured by technoscience in a way that exposes it to domination in service to arbitrary human will. The modern world is a place of total mobilization for ends that remain obscure. It is this apparent "value freedom" or "neutrality" of technology which Heidegger and later, Marcuse, identify as the source of the uniqueness and the tragedy of modernity. This is what allows technology to destroy both man and nature. A world "enframed" by technology is radically alien and hostile. The danger is not merely nuclear weapons or some similar threat to survival, but the obliteration of humanity's special status and dignity as the being through which the world takes on intelligibility and meaning; for human beings have become mere raw materials like the nature they pretend to dominate.
Both Marcuse and Heidegger are controversial figures.
Marcuse is remembered as the guru of the New Left, the darling of 1968, a
drastic foreshortening of a career which extended over more than fifty years of
intense philosophical activity. Heidegger, of course, is the philosopher who
betrayed his tradition and his calling by becoming a Nazi and recognizing
Hitler as his "Führer," never renouncing
his error publicly even after the War. And Heidegger is also, in the view of
many, the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century.
Here there will not be much discussion of these contentious
issues. Others have explored every aspect of the Heidegger case. The conclusion
I have reached from studying their views is that while Heidegger's thought
could be accommodated to certain aspects of Nazism, especially to its eschatological
mood and elitist spirit, only an astonishing insensitivity could have blinded
him to even more important incompatibilities. How he could have ignored the
philosophical implications of Hitler's biological racism is as astonishing as
his indifference to its moral evil. But then he was hardly alone in combining
academic brilliance and moral blindness. In any case, I do not dismiss
Heidegger's philosophy as "Nazi" ideology, and thus continue to study
it for its contributions to our understanding of technology.
This was also the view of Herbert Marcuse in the period of
his apprenticeship to Heidegger. Like Heidegger's other Jewish students, who
included Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith, Marcuse never noticed
Heidegger's political leanings until the surprise announcement that he was to
become the first Nazi rector of the
Despite my intention to focus on philosophical issues, my
position is bound to annoy some scholars. In the tradition of Frankfurt School
Critical theory, Heidegger is the very devil. Adorno could think of nothing
worse to say of Marcuse than that he was a secret Heideggerian, and Habermas
articulated his deep uneasiness at the extreme negativity of Adorno's negative
dialectics by hinting that its conclusions resembled Heidegger's. On the other
side of the fence there are few Heideggerians who have shown an interest in
Critical Theory. In that tradition the problems of political and economic
domination that concern these Marxist philosophers are generally dismissed as
merely "ontic."
I intend to ignore all these danger signs on my path and
forge ahead following my own inclinations. These lead me to study aspects of
the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse remote from the political debates that
surround them today. My approach is based on Heidegger’s distinction between
the Greek notion of techne and the modern idea of technology. Where the ancient
craftsman built his world in making the product of his craft, modern technology
destroys the world to the extent of its technological success. Greek philosophy
analyzed being on the model of techne, and, Heidegger argues, technology has
become the model for understanding being in modern times. Heidegger sees no way
back to the world of the Greeks, no way to recover ancient technê in a modern
context. His late speculations on what he called the "new beginning"
are much celebrated by postmodern commentators. But these speculations on what
might follow the passage through modernity are so vague and abstract the
commentators cannot agree on what they mean, much less make a convincing case
for sharing Heidegger's hopes.
Marcuse left Heidegger behind in 1933 and joined the
This is the hypothesis which I will work out in this and the
following lectures. I begin with a reconsideration of the place of Plato, Aristotle
and Hegel in the thought of Heidegger and Marcuse. I do not agree with the
commonplace view according to which Marcuse dropped Heidegger to take up with
Hegel. This view is contradicted by the fact that Marcuse presented Heidegger
with a doctoral thesis on Hegel's
Ontology in 1930, a thesis which is couched in Heideggerian terms. How can
this be explained? Aristotle’s central significance for both Hegel and
Heidegger links them together.
Aristotle’s greatest achievement, according to Heidegger, is
his analysis of kinesis, movement,
but movement in a sense no earlier interpreter of Aristotle ever conceived. It
is the movement of “factical life,” later called “Dasein,” that Aristotle is
supposed to have grasped for the first time. This movement consists in
practical engagements with the world and these are summed up in Aristotle’s
theory of technê. Technê is the model of “revealing” for the Greeks, that is, the form of Greek
experience of the world. Thus the study of kinesis leads directly to the
problems of ontology, the very problems with which Heidegger is most concerned.
Marcuse's innovative reinterpretation of Hegel is a study of
this very same problematic of movement central to Heidegger's own early
philosophy. I will argue that Marcuse's turn to Hegel is not a turning away
from Heidegger but an attempt to work out the implications of Heidegger's Aristotle
interpretation for Hegel's dialectic which, Marcuse asserts, is itself based on
Aristotle. The dialectic describes the internally contradictory character of
existence which Marcuse interprets as a theory of revealing. Marcuse's thesis
opened a possible path from Heidegger's early work toward a radical reevaluation
of modernity and its prospects which Heidegger of course chose not to follow.
Once this background has been developed, I will turn to
Marcuse's later work which appears now in a rather different light. Many things
that have puzzled and sometimes outraged commentators since the 1960s come into
focus as reflections of continuing Heideggerian influences. It would be too
much to say that he is a crypto-Heideggerian, but Marcuse is indeed addressing
questions posed by Heidegger and offering an alternative solution. This is
especially apparent in the existential demands of Marcuse's politics, his
"two-dimensional" ontology, and his approach to art and technology.
These issues will be developed at length in the later lectures in this series.
Technê and the Good
The issues raised here concern our future. We are well aware
that we are a technological society, essentially so, and not just because we
use so many devices but also in our spirit and our way of life. But only
recently has this awareness reached the humanistic disciplines, marking a momentous
change. It is strange that the 20th century, the century of
astonishingly rapid technical advance, should have produced relatively little
philosophical reflection on technology. Dewey is the only figure of the stature
of Heidegger to concern himself extensively with this theme. When Heidegger and
Marcuse wrote about technology, it was still possible and indeed more than
possible--intellectually respectable--to ignore technology. Their path breaking
reflections went beyond the boundaries of conformist thought in philosophy and
other humanistic fields. Now all that is changing; indeed, it must change for these fields to retain
any significance. Today one need not search far or deep to encounter the
question of technology: the front page of the newspapers reminds us constantly
of what is at stake in the management of its hazards and promise. The
humanities have begun to recognize this in what will no doubt be a long process
marked by resistances.
Surprisingly, these modern resistances to the question
concerning technology, particularly strong in philosophy, were not shared by
the Greeks. How did they pose the question? We can begin to uncover their
outlook by reviewing Plato’s original discussion of techne in one of his
greatest dialogues, The Gorgias. It
is worth spending some time with this text as we start out since it offers a
kind of template of all the basic issues with which we will be concerned.
The relation of
technique to values appears as a problem for the first time in the Gorgias. In this dialogue, Socrates
debates the nature of the techne, or
"art," of rhetoric. He distinguishes between true arts that are based
on a logos, and what the English
translation calls mere knacks, empeiriae in
Greek, that is, rules of thumb based on experience but without an underlying
rationale.
For Plato, such a rationale or logos necessarily includes a reference to the good served by the
art. Knowledge of the logos of the
art thus involves a teleological conception of its objects, a normative idea of
their "essence," conceived as the fulfillment of their
potentialities. If the art is shipbuilding, its logos will not only instruct the builder in putting together boards
in some sort of arrangement, but will also guide him in making a ship that is
strong and safe. The doctor's art includes not only various notions about herbs
but also a curative mission that governs their use.
In this, these arts differ from a mere knack of combining
pieces of wood or herbs without an underlying order and purpose. Technical logic and objective finalities are
joined in true arts while knacks serve merely subjective purposes. But because
we are prone to accept appearances for reality, and pursue pleasure instead of
the good, for each art there is some knack that imitates its effects and
misleads its victims. Gymnastics correlates with cosmetics, which gives the
appearance of health without the reality. Rhetoric, the power to substitute
appearance for reality in language, is the supreme and most dangerous knack. In
a debate on shipbuilding or medicine, the orator will silence the expert every
time. Means triumph over ends. The only way for the individual to protect
himself is through knowledge, which distinguishes appearance from reality and
identifies the logos of each art.
Knowledge is thus essential to the pursuit of the good.
Callicles is the most
articulate advocate of the knack of rhetoric in the Gorgias. He has an unlimited appetite for power and pleasure which
he serves through his mastery of the tricks of language. That such ambition was
not merely a personal idiosyncrasy is clear from a reading of Aristophanes,
Thucydides and other contemporary authors, all of whom denounced the moral
degeneration and egoism of the imperialistic
It is worth reviewing the argument with Callicles briefly as
Socrates' refutation of his views sets the stage for modern debates over technology
and values. Callicles intervenes in the middle of the dialogue. He argues that
the justice Socrates makes so much of is more useful to the weak than the
strong. The strong can impose their will without the help of the law. As a mere
special interest of the weak, justice has no claim on them. Natural justice
consists quite simply in the rule of the stronger over the weaker and is
diametrically opposed to conventional justice.
Callicles analyzes the earlier debates on these terms. In
all of them Socrates has caught the defenders of rhetoric in contradictions.
These defeats, Callicles asserts, were due to a trick, namely, playing fast and
loose on both sides of the line between the natural goals rhetoric can achieve,
such as domination and pleasure, and the merely conventional values of morality
and aesthetics.
Callicles' analysis is astute. For example, Polus is asked
if it is better to suffer than to do an injustice, to which he answers that it
is better to do injustice, i.e., less painful. But then Socrates asks him if it
is not uglier to do injustice, a consideration drawn from the realm of aesthetics
which Callicles regards as conventional. When Polus gives the conventional
answer, agreeing with Socrates that doing injustice is uglier, he suddenly
finds himself claiming that one and the same thing, unjust action, is better
(by nature) and worse (by convention.) But, Callicles argues, nature and
convention are opposites. Any argument that mixes the two will be inconsistent.
And so Callicles demands that Socrates answer according to nature, giving up
any direct appeal to moral or aesthetic values.
Callicles then defends a hedonistic doctrine according to
which the good is the purely subjective sensation of pleasure, a natural value.
On these terms there is no gap between the appearance of the good and its
reality. No science of the good is required to "know" that one is
having a good time! But without a distinction between appearance and reality,
the Socratic distinction between techne
and empeiria collapses: rationality,
the logos, is irrelevant to the
pursuit of the good defined as a mere feeling each can verify for himself.
The following chart
sums up Callicles' analysis with, in brackets, a fourth good added by Socrates
in the course of the discussion:
NATURE
PLEASURE (hedone)
[USEFULNESS (ophelia)]
\ /
\ /
\ /
THE
GOOD (agathon)
/ \
/ \
/ \
BEAUTY (kalon) JUSTICE (dike)
CONVENTION
Socrates agrees to Callicles' strictures and the argument
proceeds from there. In one important passage Socrates shows Callicles that the
unrestrained pursuit of pleasure leads to harm. This is not a Puritan argument:
Socrates does not claim that pleasure is actually bad in itself. Instead, he argues that pleasure is not the
highest value but is pursued "for the sake of the good". In this
passage Plato identifies the good with "ophelia," usefulness, another natural value, and
so the contradiction into which Callicles now falls--affirming that pleasure
both is and is not the good--cannot be blamed on any tricky play on the
differences between nature and convention.
After this decisive refutation, Socrates returns from
natural goods to the ethical and aesthetic values temporarily bracketed at
Callicles' request. In the famous myth which concludes the text, Socrates dismantles
Callicles' distinction between nature and convention. Rhadamanthys
judges the dead and punishes each soul that suffers from "distortion and
hideousness by reason of the irresponsibility and licentiousness, the insolence
and intemperance of its acts". Divine justice is meted out according to
aesthetic criteria--"distortion and hideousness"--but there is no
question of conventional appearances prejudicing the eye of the judge. The
aesthetic reference is ontological; it measures the "naked" soul's
actual reality. Such an ontological conception of aesthetics was perhaps more
accessible to the Greeks than to us as they commonly referred to persons and
their actions as beautiful or ugly for their moral qualities. The aesthetic in
this sense refers to how the individuals define
themselves through their actions--as virtuous, a thief, generous, a liar,
etc. The act of self-definition itself is a function of rational self-control
(or the lack of it) in terms of ethical and aesthetic standards.
The Question of Technê
Modern readers may have difficulty taking the conclusion of
Plato's dialogue seriously. The earlier shift in the argument from ethics and
aesthetics to the conflict between hedonistic and functional goods appears to
place it on a purely rational plane we can more easily accept. Since such
things as health are counted among functional goods, there is plenty for techne to do even without guidance from
contentious ethical and aesthetic standards.
But just how modern is even this phase of Plato's argument?
In one sense his idea of techne seems
obvious. Technologies are in fact subordinated to purposes which appear in the
technical disciplines as a guide to resources and procedures. Many of these
purposes derive from considerations such as health and safety that have an
objective rationale. A software engineer working for Rolls-Royce Aircraft
explained to me that 10 percent of his time was spent writing software and 90
percent was spent testing it to for safety. Plato would no doubt approve: the logos is at work at Rolls-Royce.
Yet we moderns can no longer generalize from such examples
as Plato did. For every benevolent aircraft designer, there is a bomb builder
somewhere. We can still relate to Plato's emphasis on the need for a rationale,
a logos, but we're not so sure it
necessarily includes an idea of the good.
In fact we tend to think of technologies as normless, as serving
subjective purposes very much as did Plato's knacks. What has happened to
disconnect techne and value in modern
times?
The foremost theoretician of our modern view is Max Weber.
Weber distinguished between "substantive" and "formal"
rationality in a way that corresponds in one significant respect to Plato's
distinction between techne and knack.
Substantive rationality, like technê, begins by positing a good and then
selects means to achieve it. Many public institutions are substantively
rational in Weber's sense: universal education is a good which determines
appropriate means, that is, classrooms and teachers. Formal rationality is
concerned uniquely with the efficiency of means and contains no intrinsic
reference to a good. It is thus value neutral, like the Platonic empeiria. Modernization consists in the triumph of
formal rationality over a more or less substantively rational order inherited
from the past. The market is the primary instrument of this transformation,
substituting the cash nexus for the planned pursuit of values. Bureaucracy and
management are other domains in which formal rationality eventually prevails.
The knack in Plato is subservient to the power drive of the individual subject, Callicles, for example. The will of a purely individual subjectivity can establish no larger order in society as a whole. Callicles' triumph could only lead to tyranny and the anarchic reaction that follows. Value neutrality in Weber implies a similarly subjective purpose, however market and political processes do establish an order of some sort. The question is what is that order? Weber himself was rather pessimistic. He foresaw an iron cage of bureaucracy closing on Western civilization. The logic of the technical means employed in Western society had prevailed over Enlightenment values of freedom and individuality. An order was emerging that lacked any higher purpose or significance, but that was, at least, an order. Weber's peculiarly modern brand of pessimism reaches its paroxysm with Heidegger who substitutes technology for markets and bureaucracies as the main instruments of rationalization.
But there is another more important difference between Heidegger and Weber. Weber accepted the common sense of his time and so the distinction between substantive and formal rationality appeared obvious to him. He assumed the ultimate subjectivity of substantive goals as we all tend to in a modern society where there is no universal consensus on meaning and value. For Weber as for us modern society is right to rely only on facts. The Greek faith in an objective logos has long since been refuted by modern science.
The triumph of value neutral technical means over goal-oriented thinking is the necessary consequence of our modern condition. Heidegger saw this condition as itself historically relative. Our inability to take meaning and value seriously, our prejudice in favor of factual knowledge, is precisely the mark of that relativity. It is this which makes us overlook the ontologically fundamental character of being-in-the-world and, as a result, that causes us to see Greek technê as prescientific. But can we find a way of understanding it that is not internal to modernity? This is the task Heidegger sets himself and he believes it can be accomplished with a phenomenology of everyday human existence.
Heidegger’s account of techne is quite different from the Weberian approach sketched above. He starts out from the assumption that the world is initially revealed through technê and does not pre-exist it in the form of a collection of mere present at hand things taken up by human technical activity in a contingent manner, for example, on this or that occasion to fulfill this or that passing need. Every aspect of being he uncovers in the study of technê is thus originally posited by technê. This even includes the ordinary material objects that become the raw materials of technical work. These materials are understood from out of their place in production rather than as pre-existing objects of observation.
There is thus something like a phenomenological reduction at work here. The “natural attitude,” in which things are merely given as present at hand, is suspended to allow them to appear as they are originally revealed to human activity. Technê itself is considered ontologically, as a relation of Dasein to world, rather than as a causal interaction with things. Considered as a phenomenology in this sense, Aristotle’s technê analysis displays an original unity underlying the dichotomies of objectivistic thinking. It is in fact a phenomenology anticipating Heidegger’s own analysis of being-in-the-world.
This explains why Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning
Technology” begins with an Aristotelian account of technê. The essay is based
on the idea that the modern interpretation of technology as instrumental is
inadequate, that something deeper underlies our usual assumption that
technology is a mere means. As Heidegger puts it, “the essence of technology is
by no means anything technological”. What is it then? He initially promises
that the essence of technology will be disclosed by an investigation of
Aristotle’s four causes. Heidegger claims that the Greek word translated as
cause, aition, really means to be indebted. The four
causes signify ways in which a thing is indebted for its existence.
Heidegger’s example, a silver chalice, is indebted to the
silver from which it is made, the idea of how the chalice should look when
finished, the end which limits the possible meanings and uses of the chalice to
a single way of being, and finally the craftsman who “considers carefully and
gathers together the three aforementioned way of being responsible and
indebted”. The craftsman is not the cause of the chalice in our sense at all,
but a co-responsible agent in bringing the chalice into appearance.
The Greeks call the act of bringing something to appearance
“poiêsis.” The craftsman takes his place in poiêsis through a specific type of
knowledge called technê that allows him to gather the other causes and bring
the work to completion. Technê is thus a mode of revealing insofar as it places
the finished work before us, making it present. This Greek mode of revealing
Heidegger calls a “bringing forth,” a “Her-vor-bringen”. For the Greeks, Being as a whole is modeled
on the structure of craft production, technê, and its type of revealing.
These reflections are actually a sketch of much more
elaborate analyses Heidegger developed in his early lectures on Aristotle. For
Plato, as we have seen, the distinguishing feature of technê as a form of
practice is the predominance of the logos. In his early lectures Heidegger
places the logos at the center of the Aristotelian concept of technê as well.
Thus to understand technê we must first gain an understanding of this important
concept. Logos is usually translated as “reason” or “discourse.” Heidegger
rejects these translations. “Logos,” he claims, is derived from the word “legein” which means to lay out, harvest, or gather. “Logos”
is the gathering together of the relationships that make things intelligible
and the making manifest of the results of this gathering.
But what is involved in the work of the logos? What does it
actually encompass? It is, says Heidegger, a kind of rule or law immanent to
the elements it gathers. The gathering act is an interpretation of these
elements as belonging together in a model of the thing. This model is not
simply the empirical givenness of the thing but its finished and perfected
form. In understanding this particular chair or table as what they are, I
transcend their limited and imperfect realization in the here and now toward
their “idea or “eidos.” The eidos is the “look” that the finished thing must
have to be a proper product of its technê. It is “sighted” in advance and only
on the basis of this initial sighting can technê proceed. The eidos is roughly
equivalent to the idea of “essence” which we will explore in more depth later.
Heidegger reinterprets the concepts of telos—usually
translated as “end”—and peras—usually translated as “limit”—in terms of this
understanding of the eidos. In modern terms we conceive the end as a subjective
goal and the limit as an external barrier to movement or extension.
Accordingly, we think of technical activity as subordinate to a goal in the
craftsman’s head and the product as limited by the available resources, the
environment, and so on. Heidegger reverses the terms of this modern
understanding of the eidos. The end and limit are in fact the finished product
itself insofar as it conforms to the eidos and embodies the specific limitation
that makes it this particular thing rather than another. The telos is not in
the mind of the maker nor is the peras external to the work. In a sense
Heidegger is claiming that the eidos is discovered, “disclosed,” rather than
invented and thus the end or limit it places on the product and on the
craftsman’s activities is a truth rather than a subjective intention.
The concept of eidos is closely related to that of morphê,
or form. Form is the eidos realized in an appropriate matter of some sort. The
eidos is not so much an idea as the real being of the thing to be made, what it
most intrinsically is prior to any and all ideas. As such the eidos must
appear, come into presence, through a process of formation of its material, the
hyle. Form is a state of being of that material, not
something extrinsic that happens to it accidentally. Form is the movement
toward completion that overtakes and transforms the material, stripping it of
its imperfection as it proceeds. Thus we must not conceive of the material as
essentially what it is prior to technê. Rather, the material exists primarily
in the process of technical work as what has not yet been “forged into its
boundaries,” granted the form it awaits in its primitive state.
The categories which explain the concept of technê at the
deepest level are dynamis and energeia. They encompass the activity of production
and its result. As such they are dialectical categories, for each aspect of
production is tied to a contrary aspect. Just as raw materials correspond to
form, so to clumsy action there corresponds a skill, to every potentiality an
actuality, and so on. On the one side there is a specific mode of “privation,” steresis, on the other side, its corresponding fulfillment.
This dialectical pattern is repeated over and over.
Dynamis is usually translated as either potentiality or
force. In Heidegger’s account of technê it has both these meanings. The
material, hyle, has the dynamis, the potential, to
become the finished work. In this sense, dynamis means “appropriateness.” Each
technical activity calls forth the appropriate material on which it must work to
achieve its ends. The finished work itself is “energeia,” the actualized
potential of its production process and materials. The energeia instantiates
the eidos, brings it to presence.
A second meaning of dynamis refers us to the craftsman, the producer, who possesses the force or capacity to make the work. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, these two senses of dynamis are distinguished as poiesis, the creative moment, and pathein, the moment of tolerating, undergoing. They are mutually implicated in a dialectic of action and passion, creation and receptivity. The creative power of the craftsman implies a material that can “bear” the transformations imposed on it. This “bearing” Heidegger attributes to the material as a quality he calls “bearance.” Bearance is not merely the absence of resistance, but signifies the essential availability of the material for form. The clay is not simply there to be formed into a jug; insofar as it is part of the process of production, it demands the achievement of form. “With the transformation of the clay into the bowl, the lump also loses its form, but fundamentally it loses its formlessness; it gives up a lack, and hence the tolerating here is at once a positive contribution to the development of something higher”.
We can of course reconceptualize
all this in modern terms and think of eidos, form and potentiality as
subjective ideas in the head of the maker, matter as objective things in the
world, and their encounter as a contingent happening caused by human will. This
is precisely the modern conception of technology which Heidegger claims is
alien to the Greeks. We have he says fallen away from the original Greek
conception through our inability to cling to the original meaning of technê. In
that meaning, the emergence of the thing is thought through the process of
formation. Work is not an accident that befalls indifferent raw materials but
the entry of the crafted object into a world. With this conception the Greeks
seem to have anticipated Heidegger’s own phenomenology. The thing must not be
conceived objectivistically outside its relation to the process in which it
emerges from the work of the craftsman. Rather, it is “revealed” in that
process. Existence and essence are not yet separate as they are for us.
Heidegger argues that poiêsis, production was the model of all being for the Greeks. This is not to say the Greeks thought that physis, nature itself, was a manufactured object. Rather, it is the structure of production as described above that founds Greek ontology. The essence of production is “being-finished-and-ready, i.e., a kind of being in which motion has arrived at its end” (S, 136). To be finished and complete means to instantiate an essence, the “eidos,” the look. The thing places itself into appearance in the eidos that encompasses its completed and finished form and so enters the world. Presence, ousia, is thus “producedness” and can be analyzed as kinesis in terms of such concepts as morphê and hyle, eidos, telos, and peras.
Of course the analysis can only be applied to being in general with certain modifications to take into account the difference between physis and artifacts. These modifications have to do with the difference between what has its arche in itself and in another. This determines the place of the eidos in the process. The eidos can either guide the craftsman in placing an artifact in the world, or, in the case of physis, actually place itself into the world directly and immediately, without the intervention of another. This self-placing of the eidos into existence is, however, structurally similar to production.
Until the mid 1930s, Heidegger has a primarily positive view of this approach and Being and Time is influenced by it. The production model translates between ancient and existential ontology. At first Heidegger describes Aristotle’s position as more or less identical with the coming analytic of Dasein. For example, in his 1923 lecture on Aristotle he writes: “Thus the toward-which this primordial experience of being aimed at [in Aristotle] was not the domain of being consisting of things in the sense of objects understood in a theoretical manner as facts but rather the world encountered in going about dealings that produce, direct themselves to routine tasks, and use. What is amounts to what has been finished and made ready in the movement of going about the dealings of production (poiêsis), i.e., what has come into a being-on-hand and is now available for certain tendencies to use it. Being means being-produced and, as having been produced, being of significance relative to certain tendencies to have dealings with it, i.e., being-available for them”. This passage anticipates the later theory of worldhood as the readiness-to-hand of “equipment” rather than the presence-at-hand of things.
However, as he develops his critique of technology, Heidegger begins to argue that the production model is the source of modern technological metaphysics and therefore fundamentally misguided. In some of his later works the Greek concept of production is redefined by Heidegger as a purely ideal process of manifesting. Production is cut loose from its common sense roots in the making of artifacts and becomes a synonym for revealing. By 1939, Heidegger is denying that technê is at all helpful in understanding physis, precisely the opposite position from that which he took in his earlier works. Although “The Question Concerning Technology” still discusses the Greek model, there he argues that salvation will come from a domain beyond production. It is this turn away from production which distinguishes Heidegger’s later work from Marcuse’s as we will see in these lectures.
Greek productivism is structured around “enantia,”
contraries. Contraries appear in relation to every aspect of technê, from the
relation of morphê to hyle or dynamis to energeia, to
the various forms of privation associated with dynamis. But these Greek
contraries are not modern antinomies. Each contrary implies its other and comes
to rest in its other. Hyle and morphê cannot be
thought separately, any more than can dynamis and energeia, force and unforce,
movement and rest, doing and not doing. Not only are the contraries mutually
implicated, they are engaged in a development, a kinesis with a pre-established
telos. Reconciliation of the contraries, ideal and real, is central to the
Greek view of life.
The Greeks live in a world in which everything has its place
and achieves the ideal in striving for self-completion according to its own
inner tendencies. But this world no longer exists. Modernity consists in the
diremption of the contraries into opposing principles. Facts now stand opposed
to values, and technê becomes technology, the arbitrary imposition of a
measure, a plan, and a goal on raw materials that have no telos and no inner tendencies
of their own. Heidegger attempts to overcome this tragic situation and restore
the original harmony through what he calls the “saving power” that accompanies
the growth of technology. We will examine this saving power in the next lecture
but in conclusion today I would like to consider the significance of the Greek
ideal in shaping Heidegger’s thought and especially his conception of a proper
relation between man and being.
The underlying harmony between man and being Heidegger identifies in Greek technê is ontologically fundamental even for modern times, although now it is profoundly masked by everyday reality; Heidegger evokes this harmony first with the notion of being-in-the-world and in his last period with the idea of the “fourfold.” These concepts refer to a unity of man and being, subject and object, value and fact prior to their separation in modern culture. But this unity is always obscured by inauthenticity and technology and cannot be lived fully. Salvation would consist in the realization of what philosophy recognizes at that fundamental level. The implicit harmony would become explicit, active in everyday life and thought.
What is the meaning of this appeal to a renewed harmony of
man and being from out of the hell of technological strife? It is a return to
the Greeks, a “new beginning.” Hence Heidegger’s intense interest in the
problem of technê with which the Greeks thought the revealing with utmost
clarity. But there is something overwrought about this intense preoccupation
with the Greeks. The Greeks, he assures us, are the founding fathers of Western
thought. We must return to them for inspiration to grasp the basic insight
which has unfolded even as it degenerated throughout the last 2500 years of
Western history. Heidegger famously claimed that only modern German is a
“philosophical language” on a par with ancient Greek. Such idealizations of
ancient
Schiller and Hegel proposed a remarkable theory of Greek
culture based on the difference between ancient and modern art. They contended
that Greek art, and in particular the epic poetry of Homer, revealed a world in
which meaning was not in question as it is for us moderns. Instead of appearing
as arbitrary inventions of human will, the forms of things, social roles, and
the meaning of life were given to the Greeks as true, as there to be
discovered. We have won the creativity of the subject but lost the truth of the
object. The Greeks possessed a wholeness of life that embraced subject and
object, “is” and “ought” in a fruitful and resolvable tension but we are
condemned to live them as antinomies, as an unhealed wound in the heart of
being. The Greeks were at home in the world and we are homeless.
Such ideas were certainly familiar to any German reader of
the classics in Heidegger’s day. But it is a curious fact that they resurfaced
in 1916 as contemporary philosophy in a book that excited much comment at the
time and was likely known to Heidegger. This book is Georg
Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. The
central category of Lukács’s analysis of epic literature is “totality,” by
which he means not all and everything but rather the unity of the antinomial
opposites of modern life. The Greeks lived the totality which we can only
represent aesthetically or philosophically. In the Homeric epic there is no
fundamental opposition between duty and interest, art and reality, individual
and community, between, ultimately, the soul and the world in which it finds
itself.
Lukács’s notion of totality may or may not have influenced
Heidegger directly, but the following passage from The Theory of the Novel sounds remarkably like his interpretation
of technê.
“Totality as the
formative prime reality of every individual phenomenon implies that something
closed within itself can be completed; completed because everything occurs
within it, nothing is excluded from it and nothing points at a higher reality
outside it, completed because everything within it ripens to its own perfection
and, by attaining itself, submits to limitation. Totality of being is possible
only where everything is already homogeneous before it has been contained by
forms; where forms are not a constraint but only the becoming conscious, the
coming to the surface of everything that had been lying dormant as a vague
longing in the innermost depths of that which had to be given form; where
knowledge is virtue and virtue is happiness, where beauty is the meaning of the
world made visible”.
In classical German philosophy, the idealization of ancient
II. From
Heidegger to Marcuse
The main lines of Heidegger’s critique of technology are
familiar from his famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology”. I will
not belabor it here. Being is “enframed” by the calculative thinking of modern
man. We measure, plan, and control ceaselessly, reducing everything, including
ourselves, to resources and system components. Nature is “challenged” to
deliver up its wealth for arbitrary human ends. It is transformed into a source
of energy to be extracted and delivered. But even as man takes himself for the
master of being, it is being itself which “challenges” him to challenge beings
by incorporating them into technology. Modernity is the total mobilization of
the world by humans who are themselves mobilized in the process. This
“Ge-stell,” this “enframing” within which man and being are ordered, is now the
way in which Being reveals itself. It dissolves all traditions, the linguistic
heritage, the fixed meanings on the basis of which people have engaged with the
world in the past. Being becomes the object of pure will and the meaning of
things derives from their place in the technological system rather than from an
eidos.
Yet somehow a “saving power” is said to appear out of this
nightmare. What is this saving power and what does it promise? Unfortunately,
this is precisely where the essay makes the most arbitrary and confusing leaps
from theme to theme, often proceeding by punning on words rather than logical
argument. The passage in which it is introduced is positively dizzying. I will
try to summarize it here.
Heidegger begins with a quotation from Hölderlin which
authorizes his initial leap from the idea that enframing is “the danger” to the
obscurely connected idea that with the danger a “saving power” grows. “Saving,”
we are told, means revealing something in its essence and so, if Hölderlin is
right, we ought to be approaching an understanding of the essence of technology
even as its danger blocks our understanding of revealing as such. But what is
essence? In the case of enframing, it is not a genus under which particular
devices would fall. Rather, enframing, like the “bringing forth” of the Greeks,
is a revealing. We are “destined” to this technological revealing in a way that
blocks the earlier Greek revealing.
This blocking shows up in the collapse of the Greek concept
of essence as the permanently enduring, the eidos. “It can never in any way be
established that enduring is based solely on what Plato thinks as idea and Aristotle thinks as to ti en einai (that which any particular thing has always
been), or what metaphysics in its most varied interpretations thinks as essentia”. For
the “permanently enduring” we should substitute Goethe’s related phrase, the
“permanently granting.” “That which endures primally out of the earliest
beginning is what grants”. This mysterious formula means that the revealing
itself, as the granting of a world to man, is the ultimate essence from out of
which we must think the enframing. The enframing is a revealing and so “grants”
man something he could not himself invent, namely beings. The very extremity of
the threat implied in this granting can lead us to a fuller understanding of the
process of revealing if only we “pay heed to the coming to presence of
technology”.
Never
has such a succession of non sequiturs played such an important role in the
history of philosophy! Is Heidegger dismissing the Greek concept of essence and
substituting a different concept and if so what justifies such a radical
revision of one of the foundations of Western philosophy? Surely not a vague
etymological argument inspired by Goethe! Why is “revealing,” as a “granting,”
now supposed to occupy the conceptual place philosophy has always attributed to
“essence” as what endures through change? How can technology, the revealing
which precisely blocks awareness of revealing, itself be the bridge to that
very awareness? And what is the logical connection between all these themes?
To answer these questions—and it is possible to answer them
more or less—it is necessary to consider the difference between the Greek and
the modern encounter with being. Heidegger notes that the Greeks discovered
being but then failed to ask the question of being. They were blinded by their
own discovery which led them no further than an investigation into the nature
of beings. They turned too quickly from the fact of the revealing to what was
revealed. Here is how Heidegger explains their grandiose failure.
Wonder is the “basic disposition, the one that was
compelling at the beginning of Western thinking. It let the question of beings
as such become a necessity, though in such a way that it precluded a direct
inquiry into alêtheia”. Wonder directed the Greeks toward the astonishing
presence of beings, the unusualness of the most usual, and they responded by
seeking to “preserve” being through allowing the essences of beings to appear:
“…as moved by wonder, man must gain a foothold in the acknowledgment of what
has erupted, and he must see it in a productive seeing of its inscrutable
disclosure…”. Heidegger further explains that “it is clear that this perceiving
of beings in their unconcealedness is not a mere gaping, that wonder is carried
out rather in a procedure against beings, but in such a way that these
themselves precisely show themselves. For that is what technê means: to grasp
beings as emerging out of themselves in the way they show themselves, in their
outward look, eidos, idea, and, in accord with this, to care for beings
themselves and to let them grow, i.e., to order oneself within beings as a
whole through productions and institutions”.
With this the Greeks made the fundamental discovery that the
very possibility of knowing things depends on knowing them as…., that is to say, knowing them through their essence. The
Greeks explained this with the concept of presence as producedness. Our
everyday commerce with the world is based on anticipation. We do not first know
individual facts or sense data but rather the “look” we bring to things in
engaging with them. In sum, we encounter the “what” of the thing before the
thing as the condition for encountering it in all our relations to the real,
not just in production proper. This is the background to Plato’s theory of
ideas. Heidegger appears to accept a variant of the Platonic position. We must
be acquainted, he argues, with the “essence” of things to know them. We must
know “houseness” to recognize a house, “birdness” to recognize a bird. All acquaintance with
particular facts presupposes an ability to perceive them as something. It is through this “as” that they enter a world. Thus
our experience is constantly guided by concepts. The particulars of sense
experience are not what is most real and concrete. What is primary are the
ideas that enable those particulars to emerge as what they are.
Of course this only pushes back the problem of understanding
our encounter with the world because now we must explain how we “see” the eidos
which in turn allows us to see the particulars. Heidegger admits that the realm
of essence is “uncertain, shifting, controversial, and groundless,” at least
for us moderns. The encounter with the essences of things, he argues, is a
unique kind of intuition, a “seeing which draws forth, a seeing which in the
very act of seeing compels what is to be seen before itself”. In this
“productive seeing, a conformity to something pregiven is not possible, because
the productive seeing itself first brings about the pregivenness”.
The concept of a seeing which produces its object has
emerged more than once in the history of philosophy. It appears in the
scholastic notion of divine creation and is later translated into idealistic
terms as “intellectual intuition,” the power of thought to posit its objects.
Its most important consequence has no doubt been for aesthetics, where it was
introduced by Kant to explain the nature of artistic production. The artist
produces the concrete work in all its sensuous details in the very process of
conceptualizing it. Heidegger seems to
be gesturing in this direction, although, faithful to his phenomenological
method, he complicates things by asserting that for the Greeks this productive
seeing is actually an uncovering of being in the form of pregiven meanings and
not an arbitrary act of creation. “This letting hold sway [of being] is
accomplished by exhibiting beings in their forms and modes of presence and by
preserving beings therein—occurrences in which poetry as well as painting and sculpture,
the act that founds a state, and the worshipping of the gods first obtain their
essence…”.
The Greek revealing is both a noble and a restricted
encounter with being. Its nobility lies in the recognition that the forms of
beings, the eidos, are not arbitrary products of human will, but arise from
being itself. The Greeks knew that Being grants itself to man in a revealing
which requires man as a witness. Heidegger comments, “The first task was then
to apprehend beings as beings, to install the pure recognition of beings as
such, and nothing more. This was quite enough if we consider what was
simultaneously grounded with it: the primordial determination of man as that
being which, in the midst of beings as a whole, lets beings hold sway in their
unconcealedness”. In sum, the Greeks discovered the basic premises of
Heidegger’s philosophy, or rather, Heidegger has rediscovered his own premises
in the Greek beginning.
But the restriction limiting the Greeks lies in their
inability to get beyond the eidos to its source in a process of revealing they
could not conceptualize. They knew the belonging together of Being and man but
did not “think” it. Why not? For the Greeks, the discovery of the eidos
exhausts the content of human witnessing. It is this turn from Being as
revealing to the revealed eidos of beings that eventually leads through the
many stages of Western thought to the final culmination in technology.
Heidegger,
like the Greeks, affirms both the independent reality of being and the
ontological significance of human witnessing, but the precise role of
witnessing differs for each of them. Heidegger emphasizes the fact that the
Greeks passed without pausing to reflect on the nature of their encounter with
being from wonder at being to the invention of the sciences. It was the very
strength of the Greeks, their harmonious relation to the world, that blocked
their progress toward a deeper understanding. The Greeks did not question the
essences they attributed to things and so did not ask how things could appear
in the light of their essence. That question, the question of being, can only
occur where the very concept of essence is called into question. We ask that
question in the modern world because we incessantly take apart and reconstruct
the beings around us in the works of technology. This assault on beings does
not bring them to completion in pre-given forms but proceeds according to
subjectively elaborated plans.
The modern technological revealing sweeps away all concepts
of essence and leaves only a collection of fungible stuff available for human
ordering in arbitrary patterns. We recognize, as the Greeks did not, the ungrounded nature of the
eidos. While they knew its source to be outside themselves in Being, they had
no way of justifying this insight to the ages to come. “For in the essence of
technê, as required by physis itself, as the occurrence and establishment of
the unconcealedness of beings, there lies the possibility of arbitrariness, of an unbridled positing
of goals and thereby the possibility of escape out of the necessity of the
primordial need”. Modernity is the unleashing of this arbitrariness in the
technological expression of human will.
Modernity is generally the object of Heidegger’s critique,
but he at least implicitly admits that it enables us to go beyond the Greeks in
this respect. We have discovered the active involvement of human beings in the
meaning of beings even if we express this insight in a subjectivistic
form. With this we are free to move in two different directions.
We can dismiss essence as merely arbitrary and subjective
with a consequent overlooking of the whole question of being. This is the
modern technological outlook. Modernity aims at a condition “where the
absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only ‘meaning’ and where
preserving this value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe”. The danger of this outlook is not so much its
threat to human survival as the incorporation of human beings themselves into
this “enframing” as mere raw materials alongside things. Lost in this leveling
is not just human dignity, but also awareness of the unique role of the human
being as the site of experience, the locus of world-shaping encounters with
Being.
But there is a second path opened up by the deconstruction of essences. The concept of essence,
Heidegger argues, refers to what is permanent and enduring. But just insofar as
essences are dissolved in the acid of modernity, the role of the human being in
revealing comes to the fore. It is not nature alone which reveals Being; human
being too is actively involved. The belongingness of human being and Being in
the making of worlds is the only constant that remains, and recognition of this
fact is finally possible in modern times. Indeed, while shrouding Being in the
technological enframing, modernity also contains the “other possibility…that
[man] might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing”.
Heidegger’s own philosophy is this recognition. Thus despite
Heidegger’s apparent nostalgia for this premodern past, he never suggests a
return to ancient technê. Instead, he looks forward to a new era in which new
gods will enable human beings to reclaim their place in a world no longer
shrouded in a technological order. This new era will “bring about a change in human
nature, accompanied by a transformation of metaphysics”. The new era will use
technology but it will not be technological. It will have a “free relation” to
the realm of production rather than understanding being on the model of productive
activity.
With these considerations on the
concept of revealing we reach the heart of one of the major difficulties of
Heidegger’s thought. The language in which he expresses himself seems strangely
twisted. This is not arbitrary but results from his fundamental method. He is
attempting to think the Western metaphysical tradition as a whole without being
limited to the terms of its latest stage, the stage in which, of course, he is
himself situated. How is this possible? By a strict abstention from the forms
of thought and language of the tradition. Thus Heidegger must write under constraint. In the background of
his thought there is always the unexpressed jousting with the tradition from
which he is struggling to free himself. The difficulty for us, his readers,
arises where the constraint under which he is writing forbids explaining the
outcome of that struggle.
Consider terms such as “revealing” and “concealing.” What do
they mean? Clearly, they are substitutes for traditional concepts such as consciousness,
which Heidegger’s method forbids him to use in a fundamental ontological sense.
Heidegger responds to this difficulty by rejecting the concept of consciousness
as it has come to shape the philosophical tradition. The concepts of that
tradition, such as subject and object, value and fact, are no longer the explananda but have become the explanandum.
But to explain these concepts other concepts are required that do not prejudge
all the ontological issues in terms of “modern subjectivism.” The new conceptual
apparatus cannot be an arbitrary personal invention. Instead, Heidegger finds
the new concepts in the beginning of the tradition as its lost origin. The
outcome is the vocabulary of revealing and concealing based on the Greek
concepts of alêtheia, technê, eidos, and physis. This new vocabulary is now
supposed to provide a transhistorical framework from out of the very history it
explains.
Heidegger could have helped us by saying, “I would like to
talk about this or that as you ordinarily understand it, but I can’t use your
vocabulary without inheriting the very metaphysical assumptions I must escape.
Therefore, I have rephrased the familiar problem in this new way.” We would
have been grateful to this imaginary Heidegger, so solicitous of our need for
understanding. Unfortunately, this is not the real Heidegger, an inconvenient
and unsympathetic fellow who rather self-indulgently plunges us into the cold
water of his thought without any support. There, it’s sink or swim!
Many commentators respect his self-limitation. However, an
account operating under the constraints Heidegger imposed is unlikely to shed
much new light on his meaning. We need to permit ourselves what he did not
permit himself, a free movement back and forth across the line dividing his
language from that of the tradition. This may enable us to understand some
things that remain obscure. Of course there is the risk that Heidegger’s
thought will be reduced to the very thing he attempted to escape, so-called metaphysics.
But the other risk is that his thought will end up as a scholastic play with
language of interest mainly to a narrow circle of dedicated players.
With this in mind, consider again the breakdown of the
traditional concept of essence that leads to the saving power. It would be more
natural to express Heidegger’s point by saying that today we know that meanings
are culturally relative and that this knowledge poses for us the problem of
what is ultimately real beyond the bounds of any particular culture. We are
infected by history and hence distanced from our own culture sufficiently not
to take the concept of essence for granted as did the Greeks. What separates
modern from Greek ontology is the self-evident contingency of the eidos on a
culture.
But let us look more closely at this formulation. It appears
that we moderns both know and do not know the source of the “eidos,” the
essences of things. We know it lies in culture because we know it differs from
one time and place to another. Culture, as we moderns understand it, is a human
creation. Hence the essences that open up worlds and give meaning to things
must also be human creations. Meaning and empirical reality, value and fact are
split apart forever by this reasoning. But this is precisely where the argument
breaks down. It is we moderns who, within the confines of our specific culture,
assert the cultural relativity of the essences. In so doing we beg the
question. We must be right—the facts are obvious—yet we cannot be right—as
relativists we cannot judge reality as such on the terms of our particular
cultural framework.
There is a problem here. If being is revealed only in culturally specific forms, then
culture is more than culture and cannot be explained as a merely subjective
human creation overlaying nature or a Kantian thing in itself. If there is
nothing but culture, then there simply is no such fixed and independent reality
in the background of the various cultural dispensations. But how then can we
think this “culture” which has taken on the role of transcendental source of
all meaning, including the meaning of the very concept we use to signify it?
Heidegger calls this ultimate source “being.” By this he wants to say that we
do not create meaning and impose it on pre-existing and meaningless things in
themselves. On the contrary, we are granted meaning by something that lies
beyond all human power. Being reveals itself in our encounter with our world
and thus we are indeed implicated in the granting but not as the creating and
imposing subject that commands a passive reality. Being is also implicated in
each cultural dispensation and this alone makes culture possible.
Here we reach the point where we can recognize the “saving
power,” the way in which our very nihilism can liberate us. With this
realization we can free ourselves from the specifically modern culture that
overtakes us in the technological outlook. Instead of seeing our world as mere
raw materials and system components, we can see it as a particular way in which
being appears. But this way, like all others, is partial, incomplete. Being
conceals its other possibilities in revealing one of them. Our common sense
cultural relativism is the expression of this truth of being in the language of
technology. Only in the very different language of Heidegger’s “history of
being” can we grasp the nature of revealing itself and so free ourselves from
the limitations of our own time.
Heidegger’s Dilemma
In the struggle to avoid modern subjectivism Heidegger’s
vocabulary introduces a puzzling ambiguity. Such physis-derived terms as
presence, revealing, bringing into the manifest, bringing forth, signify at one
and the same time existence and appearance, the one hinting at materialism, the
other idealism. Yet it is well known that Heidegger rejected both materialism and
idealism. In this he followed his teacher, Husserl, the founder of
phenomenology, but he also believed himself to be following the Greeks, who did
not rely on the modern distinction of subject and object from which these
ontologies derive. The concept of revealing is supposed to transcend these
antinomies. What looks like a confusion to us is in fact a deep insight: our
conviction that existence and world are totally independent of appearing is the
mistake.
Heidegger
argues that human witnessing is implicated in principle in any concept of a
world. It is meaningless to talk about a world “in itself” and humans certainly
cannot exist without a world. Neither man nor world can be considered the
ground or origin of the other. Neither can be dissolved in the other. Rather
their co-existence is absolutely fundamental. But this position leads to a
paradox. How can being require
presence without its dependence on a “besouled” being diminishing its
“self-reliance?” Heidegger insists that the presence of a witness “precisely
makes it possible for such being to secure this self-reliance in the truth….The
independence of things at hand from humans is not altered through the fact that
this very independence as such is possible only if humans exist”.
In
its original Greek form, the eidos has the independence Heidegger demands but
in a misleading objective form. He calls Greek ontology “naïve” for this
reason. The harmony of the contraries is only obtained by artificially
assigning them to each other. We see immediately “behind” the illusion and
notice just how easily they can be split apart. For example, Plato’s idea of
the logos of technê assumes an intrinsic connection between an end and a means
where we see the two as externally related. This is why Callicles seems right
to us despite Socrates’ best arguments. But, Heidegger argues, there is
something more complicated going on here that we tend to overlook. Plato and
Aristotle’s idea of technê binds the contraries together in a way that can be
validated in a phenomenology of our practical engagement with the world, but
they lack the means to express their insight properly. As a result they attempt
to present it in the everyday language of thinghood. The essential connections
they have identified appear accidental in that language, at least they do so to
us who are remote from the source of their insight in the revelation given to
the Greeks at the origin of Western philosophy.
This
limitation is overcome in Being and Time.
There the meaning of beings is rooted in Dasein’s care and not in objective
forms as for the Greeks. The production model continues to operate but in a
phenomenological context. Heidegger presents everyday Dasein as primarily
handling tools, i.e. involved in technê. But the equipmental
realm, now defined as the “world,” is no longer approached through the
structure of the product as it is by Aristotle. Instead, Heidegger develops a
phenomenology of Dasein’s use of tools. This approach grounds the eidos in
Dasein’s temporality. Dasein projects meaning on the basis of its need to be,
that is, to be this or that person engaged with this or that thing or activity
in the future. Meaning must be understood in relation to Dasein rather than
taken for granted as merely given. But it has the same function as did the
eidos for the Greeks in terms of letting beings emerge as something definite.
Sartre
would later interpret this approach as a reduction of meaning to human
intentions. This was not Heidegger’s idea at all. Rather, care “discloses” the
world and with it the meanings of the things in the world. It is not subjective
but relates Dasein to a tradition and a language. However, Sartre was not
entirely wrong in one important respect. The grounding of meaning in care
renders it contingent and indeterminate. Dasein’s relation to the model of
production is ambiguous. The human being is not governed by a fixed eidos. Its poiesis is or should be subordinate to a praxis of
self-making. Phronesis rather than techne is appropriate here, but a phronesis
that works with some unusual materials. Heidegger demands that Dasein think
itself as a totality, a finished work so to speak. This it can only do in
relation to death. Strangely, the order of steresis
and completion in technê is reversed, the privation following rather than
leading the process. Authenticity is a practice informed by this sense of
completeness. Dasein faces the extreme possibility of its being in
resoluteness, by which Heidegger does not mean arbitrary decisions but rather
“precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically
possible at the time,” that is, the response called for by the situation.
In
resoluteness, Dasein intervenes actively in shaping its world, as opposed to
inauthentic conformism. But authenticity undermines any fixed definition of
things as well. The lack of a fixed essence of man spills over onto the world
as Heidegger demonstrates the dependence of meaning on Dasein’s indeterminate
future. But do meanings then retain the necessary independence to avoid being
reducible to the subject? In other words, does Heidegger’s theory actually
fulfill his intention to remain faithful to the initial Greek discovery of
revealing?
In
Heidegger’s later work, he rejects what he sees as the implicit subjectivism
that haunts this early approach. He remains convinced that meaning is not
present at hand but now he interprets it through an original concept of history
as the advent of truth. The meaning of beings is granted in various contingent
forms in the course of history. Each of these forms is an encounter with a
partial truth about beings, an encounter which is lived as the structure of the
world.
The
history of being is a long decline from the original Greek discovery of
revealing. To explain this decline, Heidegger begins with a promising argument
concerning time. He claims that the Greeks reduced presence, ousia, to what appears in the present moment. This leads to
the objectification of the eidos which appears as present at hand in the world
even as it reveals the world. A tension develops in the concepts between the
dynamic principle of revealing and a static understanding of what is revealed.
Latin translations of Greek terms eventually cut them loose from their source
in the idea of revealing. The present at hand eidos becomes the “whatness” of
the thing, entirely separate from its existence and still later in modern times
it finally becomes a merely subjective idea in the mind. With technology
subjectivity expresses itself in calculations and plans. This is the ultimate
dissolution of the eidos. The human “conquest” of nature now prevails where
revealing once was recognized as the dynamic principle of being.
In
the context of this analysis, Heidegger takes up again the theme of revealing
in an attempt to overcome the limitations of both the original Greek
formulations and his own efforts in Being
and Time. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” he presents revealing not in
relation to Dasein’s care but rather as a dispensation emerging in the work of
art. The emphasis shifts back from the using of tools to their product. The
artist’s technê now participates in disclosing a world through the work. These
reflections on art succeed in de-subjectivizing the
notion of revealing. Meaning emerges from a creative process, a technê that is
rooted in being and includes human activity in an essential capacity. The fact
that this activity relates to the “earth” from which possibilities are drawn,
and is no longer purely individual, but founds, a community makes possible a concept of essence with the required independence. Although
now the essences of things are time bound, historical, unlike for the Greeks,
they have a certain definiteness and regain the dynamic character of a logos as
that which rules over and gathers the things themselves.
With these reflections on art Heidegger provides another
promising model for understanding the revealing of beings. But it turns out to
be an empty promise. The solution developed in Being and Time was not historical but applied to Dasein as such. It
thus explained modern as well as ancient revealing. The creative process of art
occupies the theoretical place of
Dasein’s care as the fundamental disclosive activity of man, but it cannot do
the work it is assigned. Unfortunately, the new model applies only to premodern times
when art had the power of revealing and not to the age of technology in which
we live. Heidegger claims that the creative process of art is
annihilated by technology. Art is reduced to a marginal “experience” and
confined to the aesthetic realm instead of shaping the practice of life. The
technological enframing which takes over the formative role does not so much
create meanings as destroy them, deworlding things
and reducing them to a “objectless” heap. To the extent that it reveals a
meaning, what appears is an endless repetition of the same “standing reserve,” Bestand, not the rich variety the Greeks
found in their world. This explains the extraordinary
vagueness of Heidegger’s discussion of the saving power. All he has to offer is
the remote eschatological hope that art can recover the power of revealing. But
he does not predict as much. He leaves the question open, and as we will see,
this invites other initiatives.
Heidegger neither describes the salvation he awaits nor
prescribes a path to reach it. This abstention has impressed some readers with
his profundity, while others have dismissed Heidegger’s blurry vision as a
dangerous mystification. I would like to try a different approach, a kind of immanent
critique and synthesis of Heidegger’s reflections on technique. He would no
doubt have rejected my interpretation, but it bridges the gap between his
thought and that of his student, Marcuse, who also entertained an apocalyptic
vision of a post-technological era but went beyond his teacher in sketching a
hopeful future. The point of this exercise is to show that implicit in
Heidegger’s own theory are the elements of a more concrete critique of
technology and projection of its promise than he himself developed.
Let me begin this
(no doubt blasphemous) reconstruction of Heidegger’s position by noting the moment
of reconciliation in his thought. Heidegger argued that the Greek world still
slumbered in the hidden recesses of everyday life, but that it could only be
recovered by a radically modern gesture. Thus his analytic of Dasein and
worldhood posits a quasi-Greek totality at the basis of human existence in the
intimate familiarity and practical engagement with the things of immediate
experience. At this basic level, the contraries are complementary, as they are
for the Greeks. There are no antinomies of subject and object, value and fact,
for Dasein in its everyday commerce with its world as Heidegger presents it in Being and Time.
This
“Greek” note in Heidegger’s thought comes up against a dissonant modern note
from the very start. The dissonance takes various forms throughout his career
but always returns to disturb the idyllic unity of man and world. Contraries
continually degenerate into contradictions both existentially and historically.
This is the significance of “fallenness,”
inauthenticity, nihilism. But Heidegger holds out a hope of recovery, a “Verwindung,” at
first at the personal level through the resolute grasping of the time of life,
and later through a possible “new beginning” of the history of the West through
which the antinomies of modernity would be left behind. These different
versions of recovery cannot bring about a return to the happy age of the Greeks
but remain within the general framework of modernity. But they do promise a
reconnection with meaning and limit, a recognition of finitude, and a
homecoming of sorts in the midst of modern homelessness.
This notion of
reconciliation suggests that beneath the explicit historical narrative of decline in which Heidegger situates
technique there lies an implicit narrative of a very different sort. His story
could also be told to say that the ancients understood the importance of Being
as the source of meaning, and the moderns the role of human being in its
essential activity. But each age misunderstood its own deepest principle. The
ancients confounded Being with the essences of particular beings. The moderns
confused the essential role of humanity in the process of revealing
with technical command of nature. Stripped of these misunderstandings
and adequately comprehended, this previous history opens us to what Heidegger
claims is “a more original revealing, and hence...the call of a more primal
truth”. This “turn” amounts to the revealing of the revealing itself. Obscured
throughout history by the exclusive focus on the things revealed, revealing
itself will finally become visible. The transcendental account Heidegger proposes
will enter existence as a new dispensation in which revealing as such is
encountered in its essence. On this unorthodox reading, “The Question
Concerning Technology” would culminate in a kind of posthistorical
synthesis of ancient and modern through self-consciousness.
But this is a familiar figure of thought that goes
back to Hegel: the “end of history” as history aware of itself. The young Marx repeats this figure in the notion of communism as
a “dream” from which the world need only awaken to possess its reality. The
implicit structuring of Heidegger’s essay on technology around the figure of
self-consciousness suggests a way of reading him against the grain of his own
self-understanding. This quasi-Hegelian reading is certainly untrue to other
themes in Heidegger’s thought, the very themes that led him into complicity
with Nazism and later to an undialectical and apolitical conception of a new
beginning. Nevertheless, the Hegelian reading is not arbitrary. A student
following Heidegger’s courses in the late 1920s and early 1930s might easily
have understood his problematic in this way.
Indeed,
Hegel’s dialectic suggests a solution to the central problem of Heidegger’s
later work, the construction of a specifically modern relation of man to being
that can replace both Greek bringing forth and the modern Gestell. This is the central task Heidegger must address as he
becomes dissatisfied with the solution offered in Being and Time. But despite his long struggle with the problem, his
later philosophy disappoints precisely on this point.
Although
Heidegger hopes for a new dispensation, his reflections on how meaning would
arise in that context are theoretically opaque, evocative and poetic, but
resistant to philosophical elucidation. We go from “thinking” to “thanking” but
never discover a mediation between man and being, some new way, after the
defeat of art, in which they can join creatively in the making of a modern
world rich in meaning again. The late descriptions of the fourfold appear to
offer an ontological utopia which cancels the very notion of revealing that was
Heidegger’s unique contribution. Yet without some notion of mutual mediation of
man and being thought falls behind the modern insight into the active role of
the subject. Simply waiting around for art to regain its power seems a sad
default on the promise of the Western philosophical tradition. A never quite
acknowledged religious impulse hovers in the background.
The Hegelian alternative focuses on life as a conflictual
process of self-making leading to a harmonious outcome. In its Marxist variant,
this solution promises a new era through historical action. Where would
Heidegger have ended up had he based his one intervention in history not on the
existential notion of resoluteness but on the technê of historical
self-production, the internal tensions and conflicts driving history toward the
realization of its potential? Certainly, his trajectory would have been quite
different. But had he moved in this direction it would be difficult to
distinguish his position from Lukács’s Hegelian version of reconciliation
through struggle. There is enough similarity that it could occur to Herbert
Marcuse to write a doctoral dissertation in which Hegel’s thought is
reconstructed in a Heideggerian framework as the implicit “solution” to the
problem of modernity.
Marcuse’s career as a philosopher begins with articles that
attempt a synthesis of Heidegger and a Marxism strongly influenced by Lukács’s
early writings. But Marcuse is already discontent with what he perceives as the
abstractness and ahistoricism of Being and Time. For Marcuse, political
positions are not mere opinions which philosophy can ignore, but modes of being
in the world. Authenticity is not the Heideggerian return of the individual to
himself from out of alienation in the crowd, but must reflect the social
character of existence, the fact that the world is a shared creation. Marcuse’s
early existential Marxism thus culminates in a call for a philosophy that
unifies theory and practice in a critical encounter with its time and the
issues of the day.
This existential politics once adopted remains integral to
Marcuse’s thought for the remainder of his long career. The structure of the
“world” in something close to Heidegger’s sense is at stake in all serious
political struggle. But Heidegger’s terminology, such categories as existence, Dasein,
authenticity, quickly drop by the wayside. Instead of developing an existential
analytic of political engagement along Heideggerian lines as he first proposed,
Marcuse turns to Marx and Freud. Under the influence of the Frankfurt School,
which he joins between the wars, Marcuse develops the notions of technological
rationality, one-dimensionality, and a historicized version of instinct theory
that offer sociological and psychological alternatives to Heidegger, who
disappears as a reference. But as we will see, vestiges of Heidegger’s ontology
persist in his thought to the very end.
These show up in his later critique of technology which is
influenced by Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Heidegger. But unlike these
contemporaries, Marcuse is a utopian thinker. He conceives of a redeemed
technological rationality in a liberated society, much as Plato, at the end of
the Gorgias, imagines a reformed
rhetoric that would serve good ends. Heidegger's utopian impulses were safely
checked after the mid 1930s, and Adorno and Horkheimer seem to have lost not
only hope but even the capacity to imagine a better future during World War II.
Marcuse followed a different trajectory. His writings from the 1950s on
increasingly attempt to articulate a vision. Eventually this utopianism is formulated
as a positive technological alternative
based on a transformed instrumental rationality. The old objective reason with
its substantive value content that was defeated by the positivist heritage of
the Enlightenment is revived in a new form as an answer to the triumphant
liberal technocracy of the post-war period.
The most important vestige of Heidegger’s influence shows up
in Marcuse’s theory of the two “dimensions” of society. Although his
presentation of this concept in One-Dimensional Man references many
sources other than Heidegger, on examination it reveals a remarkable
resemblance to the argument of “The Question Concerning Technology.” In fact
Marcuse describes a sort of “history of Being” that parallels Heidegger’s account
in his famous essay.
For the ancient Greeks reason is the faculty which distinguishes
between true and false not only in the realm of propositions but also in the
realm of being itself. Truth and falsehood are not merely propositional, but
involve the disclosure of being and apply in the first instance to things
before applying to statements. A “true” thing is one that manifests its own
essence. But since the essence is never fully realized, it actually negates
every contingent realization in the imperfect objects of experience. The “is”
always contains an implicit reference to an “ought” it has failed to some degree
to achieve. This “ought” is its potential, which is intrinsic to it and not
merely projected by human wishes or desires.
The Greek conception of the thing, substance, was not
static. It included an inherent movement toward higher forms. All being aspires
to its end, to a perfected form which realizes its potentialities. In fact the
Greek word "dynamis,"
"potential," already implies a kind of energy and striving. These
higher forms could be identified by a special kind of productive seeing or
abstractive intelligence that stripped away contingent features. The struggle
of being for form is negatively evident in experience itself, in the suffering
and striving world the internal tensions of which reason analyzes.
This ontological conception of reason explains the notion of
techne. The role of the arts is to
bring existence to its essential form. Implicit in every art is a finality
which corresponds to the perfection of its objects. The art of government aims
to make men just; the art of education strives to develop the rational faculty
that is the human essence. No such finality is implicit in modern technology
which emerged through the destruction of technai,
inherited crafts based on traditional values.
The similarity between this description of the Greek concept
of truth and Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient production is obvious.
However, in contrast to Heidegger, Marcuse emphasizes the implicit normative
structure of production which he generalizes to being as a whole. As we will
see, Hegel’s influence is at work in this difference in emphasis. Of course
neither Heidegger nor Marcuse suggest a return to the objective essences of the
Greeks. But they do regard
Modern technological rationality sacrifices that truth in
liquidating all reference to essence and potentiality. The empirically observed
thing is the only reality. And just because it is wholly defined by its
empirical appearance, the thing can be analytically dissected into various
qualities and quantities and absorbed into a technical system that submits it
to alien ends. Modern technical or formal reason aims at classification,
quantification, and control. Because it recognizes only empirical existence as
real, it admits no tension between true and false being and makes no distinction
between preferences and potentialities. What ancient ontology takes for an
intrinsic finality--the perfected form of things, the logos of a techne--is now
treated as a mere personal choice. Modern reason flattens out the difference
between the essential potentialities of things and merely subjective desires.
It declares its "neutrality" over against the essences toward which
these earlier technai were oriented.
Arbitrarily chosen values and essences are placed on the same plane and no
ontological or normative privilege attaches to the latter. It is this abstention
from essentializing that gives reason its peculiar positivist
self-understanding as a form of thought purified of social influences.
Things no longer have intrinsic potentialities transcending
their given form, but are simply there, unresistingly available for human use.
Means and ends, realities and norms belong to separate realms, the one
objective, the other subjective. Nineteenth century
positivism glorified the one, while romanticism exalted the other. But in the
20th Century the subjective world no longer escapes operationalization. It too
is brought under control through mass communications, management techniques,
and psychological manipulation. Human beings are incorporated into the system
as just one more item among the fungible stuff that makes up the social
apparatus. A one-dimensional world emerges in which critical reason is easily
dismissed as unmotivated neurotic discontent. Indeed, a few marginal critics
may even be functional for the system, proving the full extent of its
liberalism by their ineffective complaints. This is what Marcuse meant when he
wrote "Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through
technology but as technology, and the
latter provides the great legitimation of expanding political power, which
absorbs all spheres of culture".
So far Marcuse’s theory recapitulates Heidegger’s contrast
of ancient techne, based on the realization of essential potentialities,
and modern technology which “enframes” nature and society in a rationality of
calculation and control. It is in their solutions that the difference between
them appears. For Heidegger, philosophy can only reflect on the catastrophe of
modernity, but Marcuse goes beyond earnest contemplation of the present to
project a concrete utopia that can redeem technology. Despite the enframing,
critical reason is still capable of formulating transcending demands for a
better society.
But Marcuse has accepted enough of Heidegger to make this
positive turn extremely problematic. A redeemed technology would respect the
potentialities of things and recognize the creative human role in the shaping
of worlds. These claims correspond roughly to Heidegger’s notion of a new era
in which Being and human being stand in a self-conscious balance. But for
Marcuse, respect for things requires more than a change in attitude; it would
also have to transform the technological practices of modernity. Marcuse’s new techne
would enhance life rather than inventing new means of destruction. It would be
environmentally aware and treat nature with respect. Recognition of humanity’s
place in the order of revealing requires valorizing the sensibility and
imagination through which the potentialities of things are manifested. A
receptive--Marcuse calls it a “feminist”--subjectivity would animate the new techne,
replacing the aggressive subject of technological rationality. Can we make
sense of these hopeful projections? In my next lecture I will explore Marcuse’s
early attempt to found this utopian conception on an original reading of
Hegel’s ontology.
III. The
Dialectic of Life: Marcuse’s Hegel
Implicit in Marcuse's critique of technology is a modern
revival of the classical conception of techne.
Technology is to be reconstructed around a conception of the good, in Marcuse's
terminology, around Eros. The new
technical logos must include a grasp
of essences, potentialities, and technology must be oriented toward perfecting
rather than dominating its objects. Marcuse thus demands the reversal of the
process of neutralization by which formal rationality was split off from
substantive rationality and subserved to domination.
Marcuse accepts the modern view that essences can neither be based on tradition and community standards nor speculatively derived in an apriori metaphysics of some sort. But what he calls "one-dimensional thinking" plays out that modern skepticism by rejecting the idea of essence altogether and remaining at the empirical level. It thereby avoids tradition-bound conformism and outdated metaphysics but only by treating the logic of technology as an ontological principle. It can recognize inherent potentialities no more than can technology and so offers no guidance to technological reform. How then can technology be informed with essential values? To what can Marcuse appeal for criteria?
Like Heidegger, Marcuse dismisses any return to Greek metaphysics. But unlike Heidegger, he refuses to reduce all essential thinking to the contemplation of the process of revealing. Instead, he seeks to reconstruct the concept of essence historically. Marcusean historicism is rooted in the Hegelian and Marxist tradition as interpreted by Dilthey and the early Marxist Lukács. Dialectics, as a logic of the interconnections and contexts revealed in historical strife, offers a modern alternative to ancient dogmatism and modern positivism. Hegel’s Logic dissolves the traditional distinction between essence and appearance in the dynamics of their relation. Things do not have fixed essences separate from their manifestations because things are not themselves stable and fixed. Rather, they belong to a field of interactions which establishes their inner coherence and their boundaries. These interactions are a source of tensions which drive them forward toward their developmental potentialities.
Marcuse’s first book on Hegel, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, was submitted as a thesis to Heidegger in 1930 and published in 1932. In it Aristotle is presented as the key to Hegel, but as we will see it is a very strange Heideggerian Aristotle. Of course we are not concerned here with either the real historical Aristotle, nor even with the fidelity of Marcuse to Hegel or Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretations. What is significant is the way in which concepts from Heidegger’s Aristotle enter into Marcuse’s work and dominate his interpretation of Hegel. The similarities that emerge from this comparison are striking. The difference, of course, is also significant: Hegel is already a modern thinker and unlike Aristotle can speak to us directly. We can engage with Hegel as a contemporary in the (unmentioned) version of his dialectic found in Marx and Lukács.
Marcuse asserts that the central Aristotelian category at the basis of Hegel’s Logic is kinesis, translated as “Bewegtheit” or “motility.” This is the very same category on which Heidegger focused in studying Aristotle. Marcuse writes, “The presentation of the Idea of being as motility lies at the core of Hegelian ontology”. It is this focus which “allows Hegel to revive the great discoveries of Aristotelian philosophy by removing the cover which tradition had spread over them. Aristotelian philosophy is set once more on its true path: proceeding from the negativity and dividedness of being (the dichas of the categories, morphe and steresis—on dynamei and on energeia…as the basis of its motility.… progressing until that most actual form of motility and the most actual being—noesis and noesos”. Marcuse identifies this duality at the heart of Aristotelian being with the bifurcation of being in Hegel, the internal contradictions that drive the dialectic.
Recall that Heidegger reinterprets Aristotle’s objectivistically developed idea of production as the source of his own phenomenological analysis of worldhood. Many of the details of Aristotle’s analysis are lost in the phenomenological repetition, but Aristotle’s focus on production and his discovery of the mutual dependence of revealing and human Dasein is preserved and sharpened, taking into account the dissolution of fixed essences in modernity. Later Heidegger will relate the breakdown of ancient essentialism to technology but in the early Heidegger this connection is not yet clear. In any case, the new theory of revealing was worked out in detail in Being and Time and in courses which Marcuse no doubt attended.
For Marcuse’s Hegel too production is central. It manifests being in the form of actuality which involves not only entry into existence but more significantly, entry into a world which has about it the “needed belonging” of life, a living, knowing being, a Dasein in Heidegger’s sense. Because Hegel interprets this productive activity as historical, as happening in the events that shape the world, it involves human action. Marcuse comments, “It is no accident that with the expressions ‘deed’ and ‘activity’ one hears the Greek poiêsis, as an ontological category which defines Being as a product, as fabricated, and as ‘prepared.’ This certainly does not imply something produced by an other, being as prepared by humans; it means rather that Being is produced by and through itself”. As we saw with Heidegger, so with Marcuse the structure of physis is explained through poiêsis. This surprising identification of apparently opposite modes of activity can hardly be a coincidence.
As for Heidegger, so for Marcuse, there is a dereifying intent behind this conception. The goal is to break through the objectivistic veil to the “things themselves” as they are phenomenologically revealed. At that ontologically fundamental level, things do not stand alone, fixed and frozen in their nature awaiting a purely accidental encounter with a cognitive subject. Instead they exist in a dynamic relation to Dasein, which discloses them in its practical life activities. As Marcuse’s Hegel puts a similar point, “Life is consciousness and self-consciousness first and only because it is the 'universal medium' and 'fluid substance' of beings.... Life is a mode of being with whose existence all entities become deobjectified, are 'related' to life, and come alive".
Heidegger's early analysis of production in Aristotle was formative for his conception of worldhood. However, worldhood has an ambiguous status in Heidegger's work. On the one hand, Dasein is being-in-the-world, inconceivable out of connection with its environment. On the other hand, the truth of Dasein's being is discovered in the breakdown of its world. Anxiety, dread, boredom, living-toward-death are all stances through which the individual gains access to the complete groundlessness of worldly existence. In the later Heidegger productionism is treated negatively, as the fundamental error of Western metaphysics. Thus although Heidegger begins his analysis with production, it ends in existential and eventually quasi-religious themes far removed from these beginnings.
Hegel offers a strangely similar spectacle. The master-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology places work at the center of the theory. Its generalization as an ontological model suggests that all meaning and truth arise in a productive relation to reality. However, like Heidegger, Hegel abandons these productionist beginnings and his theory concludes in the ether of the absolute, a purely cognitive relation to reality which Hegel himself compares to the self-thinking thought of the Aristotelian God.
Heidegger is critical of Hegel’s notion of a cognitive absolute, which he sees as a typical Cartesian evasion, substituting epistemology for more fundamental ontological issues. Marcuse shares this critique, but he is also critical of Heidegger’s own withdrawal from concrete history to which, by contrast, Hegel’s dialectic leads in Marx. Rather than dismissing Hegel as Heidegger is sometimes tempted to do, Marcuse distinguishes two closely related approaches in Hegel’s thought, one of which defines the absolute as knowledge while the other defines it as life. Life in Hegel’s early work is a process of movement, negating and accommodating an environment. The unity of the living thing and its world can be conceived phenomenologically as an ultimate foundation embracing all levels of being. The choice of life as a fundamental ontological theme makes sense of the emphasis on interconnectedness and process in the dialectics of development. The life process has a direction: life seeks to preserve and further itself. Yet its potentialities are not confined to a predetermined end. Rather, it invents its future as it moves. This is of course eminently true of modern human beings, the actions of which are self-conscious and deliberate. Life can thus support a true “fundamental ontology” oriented toward history as a concrete social process.
Marcuse concedes that Hegel also describes life on the terms of cognition. This inverse perspective dissolves life in the absolute and eliminates history. Hegel's phenomenology attempted to combine these two incompatible perspectives to reconcile life as historicity and the absolute as a form of cognition beyond history. In Hegel’s later work, life is displaced more and more by an ahistorical, cognitive absolute.
Where Hegel went wrong was in taking the dialectic for an all encompassing system culminating in knowledge. This self-interpretation contradicts his own most original discoveries in his early work up to Phenomenology and The Logic. Hegel’s vulnerability to this unfortunate self-interpretation Marcuse traces back to his attempt to apply the dialectic to nature, to “absolutize historicity,” which leads to a “flattening” of the dialectic. The blurring of the boundaries between nature and history risks tilting the whole enterprise away from practice toward theory. This, Marcuse argues, is what eventually happens in Hegel’s later work and in the tradition of interpretation derived from it. At this point, Marcuse’s concerns converge directly with Lukács’s own restoration of the dialectic in the Marxist tradition. For both the principal problem is to uncover the dynamic theory of historical agency implicit in the Hegelian dialectic. It is precisely this aspect of the dialectic which cannot survive its extension to nature through which it becomes either a regressive emanationist metaphysics or a merely methodological prolegomena to the positive sciences.
Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology also abstracts from nature in placing historicity at the center of its interpretation of being and so can be reconciled with Lukács’s version of Marxism in this respect. But Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein fails to achieve the level of concreteness implied by the notion of historicity. The historical world cannot be understood without reference to the divisions within the community whose history it is. Marcuse asks, “is the world ‘the same’ for all existence within a concrete historical situation? Apparently not. Not only do we have different meaning-worlds for particular co-existing cultural spheres, but even within these spheres, huge abysses stand out between their meaning, e.g., in terms of existential attitude….At this point the investigation necessarily meets the question of the material constitution of historicity—a breakthrough that Heidegger nowhere achieves or even mentions”. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic introduces social division into the motility of history. This then prepares the way to an assimilation of Lukács's historical dialectics.
Lukács’s principal insight is the concept of reification, the restructuring of social relations as things and relations between things. The concept derives from the Marxist notion of the fetishism of commodities interpreted critically in Hegelian terms as a “form of appearance,” a modality of essence. Reified thought is the sociological equivalent of the objectivistic and mechanistic empiricism criticized equally by Hegel and Heidegger. And as in their theories, so in Lukács reified appearances mask a more fundamental “totality,” or “being-in-the-world in which subject and object, Dasein and being, are unified rather than split apart in an eternal antinomy. It is only on the ground of this prior unity that the bifurcation between them can open up. Labor, disalienated through revolution, will restore that unity through the self-conscious appropriation of social reality by the proletariat.
This Lukácsian dialectic lies in the background of Marcuse's explanation of Hegel's concepts of life, work, and the absolute. However, Lukács is the great structuring absence of the book which is, after all an academic thesis presented to a very conservative faculty. The fact that Marcuse cannot mention Lukács or suggest a Marxist alternative to Hegel creates problems for the reader. The discussions of the higher levels of Hegel’s dialectic is incredibly abstract. It is hard to imagine how they would have been interpreted by a Marxist schooled in Lukács at that time. But this is what we must now learn to do if Marcuse’s book is to make sense as an expression not only of his scholarly interests but also of his very intense political convictions.
Common sense holds that empirically existing things are all that is. This view, which Aristotle criticized in his discussion of the Megarians in the Metaphysics, leaves out of account the internal dynamics of becoming through which things are "brought forth," the “how” of the thing. Hegel begins where Aristotle left off with the explanation of these dynamics. He interprets the difference between dynamis and energeia as a “bifurcation” in being. He calls the empirically existing thing “existence” or “being-there” (Dasein). It realizes in actuality the dynamis implicit in its being. This dynamis contains the potentialities or "truth" of the thing. Hegel calls it "in-itselfness." What the thing is in itself always transcends its existence.
The bifurcation of being consists in the split between in-itselfness and being-there. Hegel calls it the "negativity" inherent in being. Beings are not only divided in themselves, they are in motion due to the tension their inner division creates. Thus the bifurcation means that being is never simply itself, but always "in another," possessed of unrealized possibilities and involved in the process of transformation that moves it forward. This motility is the Aristotelian kinesis which, as in Heidegger’s interpretation refers to change in general.
But if being is divided, fraught with negativity and condemned to constant movement, then the question arises how the fragments can be held together. Hegel's concept of motility addresses the problem of achieving or maintaining unity in the midst of change. This unity is actuality, energeia, but as in Heidegger’s Aristotle, so in Marcuse’s Hegel, actuality is not simply "there" but is itself a type of movement. Hegel calls this unity of motile, bifurcated being, “being-by-oneself-in-otherness.” "Existing in the condition of negativity, being 'must posit the unity that is contained within it', must absorb each negativity into itself as its very own, sublate it, and must relate itself to itself through it. Thereby it must win the unity of its existence, and preserving this, it must unfold itself out of it”.
The split in being is thus not a simple fact; it is an active self-relation, a for-itselfness. Note the presence of the term "self" in this account. Marcuse describes the stages of motility in terms of the concept of selfhood as an inner division that unifies itself. Things too can have a “self” in this sense, at least formally, since they unify a manifold of determinations.
At the lowest level of “determinate" or "immediate" being, things appear to be self-subsistent and independent of other things. At this level things do not have a necessary relationship to other things, their own process of change, or the accidents of their own being. They simply are without an "interior" or some sort of relation to their own "self." However, even at this level a first division appears between their possibilities and their given form.
Once being is set in motion by possibility, things lose their integrity and solidity. The are not yet capable of self-production as is an essentially grounded being which can maintain itself through change. Instead, in changing beings got beyond their “limit,” the Aristotelian peras or telos, and lose their identity. Their in-itselfness places them into relation with that which succeeds them in the process of change. This process of change appears external to the things themselves, something which befalls them from without. Yet it must be explained in terms of the possibilities contained in the things. The log which burns in the fireplace generating smoke and heat is transformed according to its own nature. Its existence is annulled in the process but not arbitrarily. Viewed in this light the world consists in a vast system of possible exchanges and transformations. Beings are not independent of each other but are bound together in essential relations.
Change at this level is interpreted through the Aristotelian category of steresis or privation. Marcuse writes that for immediate being, “The in-itselfness of the something is a specific form of impotence (powerlessness.)”. Being’s powerlessness is the fact that its movement is its death. The being-in-itself of immediate being is that into which its “powerless” being is transformed. The concept of powerlessness resembles Heidegger’s analysis of Aristotelian bearance, the particular type of steresis in which beings go over into something else. But as with Aristotelian steresis, the passage to another is not arbitrary but reveals the truth of the original being that dies in changing. The similarity to the notion of matter in Aristotle is also clear. Just as matter goes beyond itself “appropriately” in taking on form, so beings realize their potential in the process of change even as they lose their identity in becoming another.
Marcuse explains this Hegelian conception of the limit of being as a new kind of finitude that implies a radical philosophical atheism. He writes, “For the first time the concept of finitude is removed from the theological tradition and placed on the ground of pure philosophical ontology. It is no longer the finitude of being as ens creatum in contrast to a creator God that is meant here. The finite is not contrasted to anything else, not even to the infinity of beings themselves, which Hegel dismisses precisely as the ‘bad’ infinity. From this point on, Hegel opens the wholly new dimension of the universal historicity of beings and clears the way for understanding the essence of the historical. The process of happening of finite beings is not a development toward some previously determined or undetermined goal. It is not at all a happening to and from. It is a pure happening in-itself, immanent to beings themselves. The finite being does not have a history; it is history.” But this means that there can be no end of history, no final reconciliation, no ideal the realization of which would interrupt the ceaseless movement, the restlessness of being. Essence then can no longer be taken for granted as an atemporal meaning and purpose but is also thrust into history.
Marcuse is famous for having written a book entitled One-Dimensional Man. What is less well known is that he introduced his notion of dimensions of being in this early Hegel thesis to explain the relation of essence to immediate or determinate being. With this concept of dimensions Marcuse addresses the problem of the eidos which lies at the center of Heidegger's Aristotle interpretation. In Marcuse's account Hegel, like Aristotle, offers a solution to the Platonic split between the eidos and actual being. Marcuse writes that the “two dimensions…are not isolated and self-subsistent worlds that need to be brought subsequently in relation; they are dimensions of being which are from the beginning ontologically dependent on one another, and which only continue to exist through each other and which only move themselves within their conflictual unity”. The two dimensions, essence and existence co-exist necessarily in the self-manifesting of essence in existence.
At the level of essence, the possibilities of things are their own, rather than another's. The self-relation of the thing is active, unifying it around what it can become instead of passing over into another as its possibilities are realized. The thing “posits” itself as a unity in its multiple determinations and encounters with other things. Hegel’s concept of actuality as “equality-with-self-in-otherness” or being-by-oneself-in-otherness refers to the fact that beings sustain themselves through change as always themselves and yet other in the many different ways in which they evolve, relate to their causes and effects, and separate themselves from themselves in various processes of self-definition and self-awareness.
But this means that what a being is is always in question in terms of what it should become in conformity with its essence. The normative moment present in the notions of dynamis and energeia now comes to the fore. Untrue being must give way to true being. The revealing of the true being is a process of development. As for the Greeks, so for Hegel, a kind of harmonistic necessity binds beings to what they can become. However, this interpretation opens up new problems. The modernized idea of energeia is no longer bound to a pregiven eidos. This is freedom in the modern sense without the arbitrariness and externality associated with the materialist account. A totality continues to exist, but now its logic must be discovered in its development rather than positing that development in terms of the eidos. This self-creation is teleological without a prior telos, aims at an end which it itself creates.
Hegel avoids regression to ancient dogmatism by deriving essence from the tensions in appearance and between things. Essence is both the internal relation of the thing in itself to its determinations, and the external relation of the thing to the other things with which it necessarily coexists. Essence is relatedness and the development which proceeds out of relatedness. This is eminently true of the living human being. Hence, “All of what I can become as this determinate individual is already there, not in the sense of a mystical predetermination, but in the sense that my concrete person depends on the ‘existing multiplicity of circumstances’ out of which and within which alone it becomes what is possible for it”.
The dialectic of essence underlies the shift from Aristotelian technê to Hegelian historicity. Life is a self-production based on the construction and realization of its own potentialities. Hegel understands this productive activity as a diremption within life. Life requires a world in which to deploy itself. The living subject “makes” this world and in confronting it confronts its own potentialities. The world is not nature in the sense of the natural sciences. Rather, it is what correlates with the tendencies of life, its needs, movements, perceptions. In modern terms, we could call the world life’s “niche,” that segment of reality to which it necessarily relates.
The activity of making a world also takes a more literal form in the concept of labor as objectification developed in the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology. Life involves desire and labor which are forms of activity in which it brings forth itself and its world. The intrinsic contents of the self are objectified in the world through labor. It is through labor that self-consciousness animates things and thinghood achieves its fullest actualization. The object as indifferent barrier, as the “negative” other of life, is overcome.
Work takes on an extended sense in Hegel and refers not merely to the making of artifacts but to all forms of objectification, including the creation of institutions and culture. The structure of productive activity in the narrow sense becomes the model for historical creation. Marcuse writes that this concept of the objectification of the life of a community through labor was “perhaps Hegel's greatest discovery”. This is the essential concept of historicity which does not simply explain change, but which is the basis for an account of the worldhood of the world in terms of human activity. “The world subsists and is real only through the knowing and acting self-consciousness whose ‘work’ it is”.
This interpretation of Hegel’s concept of life has similarities to Marxism, particularly the Marxism of Lukács, as is clear in Marcuse’s contemporary essays. He writes, for example, that the master-slave dialectic “means the process of reification and its transcendence as a basic occurrence of human life, which Marx represented as the basic law of historical development”. I will return to this theme later in this lecture.
There is also a striking similarity between this account of Hegel’s concept of life and the relation of Being and Dasein in Heidegger. In the background stands Aristotle once again. Like Heidegger Marcuse wants to argue that being “reveals” itself in the relation of dynamis to energeia. The movement of actualization is also an appearing. Marcuse attributes to Hegel the same insight and argues that it is this insight which enables Hegel to recover the inner truth of Aristotle's philosophy. Hegel interprets Aristotle's concept of energeia as “a showing of itself as exposing, revealing, and displaying itself”. “Essence is a showing, revealing, and manifesting of itself. 'Essence must appear'”.
In Heidegger revealing involves the necessary relation of Dasein to being. Combining Hegel and Heidegger, one might say that not only must Being appear, in appearing it requires Dasein -- the subject -- before which to appear. Marcuse writes, “Hegel insists on this original phenomenon: whenever being is encountered, it appears through the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. That is to say, it appears through difference in general and in a condition of bifurcation. Whenever the absolute ‘posits itself in the form of existence, it must posit itself in a duality of form. For appearing and self-bifurcation are one’”. Following Heidegger, Marcuse describes this appearing as an event. The unifying activity of life is what allows the world "to happen as the world". The happening of the world -- Heidegger calls it the "worlding" of the world -- is the ultimate motility.
Hegel’s dialectic culminates in the concept of the absolute. But as I noted earlier, this concept is ambiguous, emphasizing life as practical engagement in the earlier works and theoretical abstraction in the later ones. Marcuse’s analysis of the absolute preserves the earlier priority of life against Hegel’s tendency to reduce it to a stage in the development of the absolute as knowledge. This puts him at odds with the mainstream of Hegel interpretation which takes off from Hegel’s distinction of philosophical wisdom and practical life. Philosophy comprehends the necessity underlying the dichotomies of practical life and thereby transcends them. But practical life itself need not possess this wisdom. The naive individual who attends church or sees a great work of art is in the presence of the meaning of practical life in a pre-theoretical form. The philosopher alone raises these representations of meaning to their concept in self-consciousness.
The absolute so conceived unifies all being through knowledge. The philosopher (Hegel) knows himself and his world as his own and so is not dispersed in the multiplicity of beings, nor compelled by them to “work” for his own survival, but subsists among them in unity and freely affirms their difference from himself. He is at home in them as the realization of the conditions of his own selfhood. Yet he does not deny their plurality but rather preserves it even in unifying being with himself.
This extremely abstract formulation can be concretized. At the risk of banalizing Hegel's insight, consider the notion of challenge. A challenge is not simply an obstacle although it may at first appear such. Unlike the object of work, the challenge is not overpowered and transformed, it is “met.” Nor is meeting a challenge the annihilation of the challenge as such. To meet a challenge is to encounter an apparent obstacle as an opportunity for growth, self-development. The challenge must therefore be respected in its right to challenge and not evaded simply to achieve a goal. Indeed, the true goal can only be reached by maintaining the challenge in its challenging nature. The challenge is ours and yet to be a challenge it must be other. In meeting the challenge appropriately the individuals meet themselves as they would hope to be. Then they have transcended “the fixed oppositions of subjectivity and objectivity” while preserving “the plurality of all oppositions among beings.” In terms of the mainstream cognitive interpretation of the absolute, we could say that the self-conscious understanding of the growth process is not necessary to growth but belongs to the philosopher who recollects growth in its truth in the eternal “afterwards” of knowledge.
In interpreting his doctrine in this way, Hegel places the self-consciousness of life beyond life. But this seems to imply an accidental relation between knowledge and its objects which the absolute was precisely supposed to transcend. The moment of realization, like the emergence of the philosopher from Plato’s cave, is incommensurable with life and its flow. History, as that flow, “ends” in a knowledge which transcends it. This timeless knowledge can then also encompass timeless nature as well and so achieves completion.
If we do not believe a cognitive absolute of this sort can play the role of absolute, but insist with Marcuse on a living absolute actively engaged with being in a world, then we are on a difficult path. The absolute as an ultimate self-consciousness can encompass all being, nature and history, object and subject, fact and value, but life appears to be limited to one side of the dichotomies. Marcuse’s solution to this dilemma is to assume that the encounter of life with being is no contingent relationship of subject with object but has an essential character. Life is neither a cogito nor an object of knowledge. It is rather a universal mediator, incorporating everything into its process. In its transcendental function, life creates a world on the one side and a living being in that world on the other side. Subject and object emerge from this common source. Hegel’s term for this underlying unity is “totality.”
How is this conception of totality related to knowledge, which is surely an aspect of the absolute in any interpretation? Marcuse shifts the emphasis from what is known to the being of knowing. Knowledge is not considered in an epistemological light, but rather ontologically. Knowing is a mode of being of subject and object rather than an accidental relation of subject to object. Knowledge has the structure of a totality that does not annul the difference between its moments. It exemplifies the principle of being-oneself-in-otherness. So, Hegel’s absolute is not a detached cogito, the object reduced to the subject, but rather knowledge as a model of the kind of unity that can be attributed to being in its multiplicity and internal opposition.
Let us return again to the example of challenging to clarify this abstract formulation. In analyzing this example Marcuse would emphasize the fact that life, as essentially a process of growth, encompasses the challenge and the challenged in a single system. The system is not truly complete so long as it is unself-conscious. Of course challenges are constantly met in unself-conscious practical life. However, the stage of the absolute is reached only where the individuals recognize this condition as a necessity of their being and of the being of the challenge itself. In self-consciousness, we not only meet the challenge and grow but affirm growth as the meaning of challenging as such. The challenge no longer appears as an accident from which growth proceeds accidentally, but as essential to the human condition. The knowledge of this is itself a dimension of growth, true maturity. If I do not understand how meeting challenges has made me what I am, I have not fully grasped the challenge that now stands before me. Indeed, it may appear to me as a mere obstacle to be overcome rather than as an opportunity to transcend myself and I may attempt to evade it. Hence self-consciousness is essential to challenging considered in its systemic unity. This is unity through difference transcending the opposition of subject and object, theory and practice.
Such self-consciousness displaces the center of my being toward the system. I am no longer a worker attacking a thing to be worked on, a life confronting an environment, an ego facing an other, or rather, I am that ego but also the other insofar as I accept and affirm myself in my role in the system. In this sense life is the unity of subject and object, not the subject opposed to the object or independent of it in pure knowledge. Life is not a specific type of thing in the world, but a way in which the world exists and shows itself, in Heideggerian terms, “being-in-the-world” itself.
It is clear from Marcuse’s other writings in this period that this analysis contains a coded reference to Marxism. The connection is explicit in “On the Problem of the Dialectic.” There he explains that “This ‘Ego’ of human life, to which the dialectic thus ‘returns,’ is not primarily cognitive thought but the full being of life occurring in the real world. The necessity of the dialectic lies in the necessity of this life to be able safely to control the essence of being in all life situations. The ‘dialectic of the self-consciousness’ is not a free floating dialectic of cognition but tied to the concrete being and action of human life”. This concept of self-consciousness joins theory and practice in a unity. Life “can only fulfill its essence if it mediates all its immediate existence (which, measured against its actual possibilities is essentially an ‘otherness,’ ‘loss of its self’) with its self-being and changing this existence makes it is own, ‘adapts itself.’ Only in this change through the process of negation does the living Ego remain like itself in otherness”. And Marcuse concludes, “Hegel means the process of reification and its transcendence as a basic occurrence of human life, which Marx represented as the basic law of historical development”.
There is much that is still implicit or undeveloped in this statement of the case, in particular the relation between dereification and class consciousness as a form of self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense. It was Lukács who introduced this problematic into Marxist circles in this period and Marcuse is clearly drawing on his insights. How much of Lukács’ argument he accepted is uncertain. We know he rejected Lukács’s vanguardism, but this is politically rather than philosophically significant. Lukács's far more important theory of practice illuminates the implicit background to Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel’s absolute as self-conscious life.
Lukács distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of practice, a reified "contemplative" practice characteristic of bourgeois society, and a proletarian transforming practice which "penetrates" its objects. The model of contemplative practice is the relation of the worker to the machine. The machine is self-contained; it has its own logic, the law of its operation; the worker is external to the machine and tends it without actually controlling its autonomous functioning. For Lukács, this type of subject-object relation exemplifies the reified practice of a capitalist society, whether it be entrepreneurial activity, buying and selling on markets, or scientific research. Contemplative practice is thus not simply passive as the term suggests, but technical, manipulative in character. It modifies the world, to be sure, but it leaves its objects essentially unchanged. Indeed, it presupposes the law of its objects which it comprehends and applies according to the Baconian principle that "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed."
Despite the frenetic activity of a technical civilization, its practice does not affect the essence of its objects--their law, only their manifest form, their appearance. Activity at the level of appearance depends on a passive relation to law, which practice merely "contemplates" and does not attempt to change. The activism of the bourgeois subject is based on fatalistic acceptance, "realism," at a deeper level. This realism shows up in the idealistic notion of values as irretrievably cut off from the facts of this world. Philosophy's reified subject-object conception raises this structure to the highest level of abstraction. According to Lukács, when Kant demonstrates that the world of experience is rigorously determined by the laws of physics, he opens it to unlimited technical progress while excluding in principle any role for values in its development.
Contemplative practice separates theory, in which law is comprehended, from practice in which it is applied. This separation distinguishes it from both technê, in which knowledge of the eidos guides the realization of intrinsic potentialities, and from the “sight” which guides the activity of Dasein in immediate relation to the equipment of its world. In these cases knowledge is a phase of the practical activity, a logos in Plato’s sense, rather than an external value neutral complement to it.
In contrast to contemplative practice, Lukács introduces the concept of a transforming practice that attacks the laws themselves. It is a non-technical practice that grasps the essence of its objects and changes them at the deepest level. The implicit model of this type of practice is self-consciousness. In personal life we notice the distinction between beliefs such as self-contradictory notions or self-deceptions that are immediately cancelled by self-consciousness, and other beliefs that are not modified when we become aware of holding them. The social equivalent of the former type is the market. When buyers and sellers act on the market, they form a collective subject which is unconscious of itself. Their practice is determined by the "law" of the market they each use to get ahead, but that law is the combined effect of their very attempts to use it. The condition for the emergence of such a system is its fundamental misrecognition by social subjects. This misrecognition has complex ideological roots in the preconceptual structuring of the social as a realm of individual activity on alien objects. But this structuring is historically contingent. By coming together, becoming conscious of the consequences of their action, and coordinating voluntarily, the individuals can overcome the reified form of objectivity of their objects; they can change the "law" of their action and create a different type of social world.
For reasons explained by Marxist theory, Lukács attributes this transforming power to workers’ self-consciousness. Workers "produce" society through their labor and through their participation in capitalist institutions. When they come together, therefore, nothing can stop them from transforming the society they constitute unconsciously qua workers. But the condition of this transformation is self-consciousness, workers' recognition of their own real social role. That recognition then itself constitutes a fundamental social change because it changes what it is to be a worker, from passive, reified social atom to collective agent: "the act of consciousness overthrows the form of objectivity of its object".
In this case self-consciousness is simultaneously awareness and action; it transcends the gap between theory and practice characteristic of the reified standpoint. Lukács's innovation is to attempt to conceive of social transformation on this model, as a highly complex and socially mediated expression of self-consciousness. Self-recognition and disalienation in the social sphere then involves collective self-awareness.
Lukács’s theory of practice can be summed up in three equivalences: in the social domain, we are in the strongest sense the object, that is, society, and thus our knowledge of society is self-knowledge and our self-knowledge transformative. Historically concretized in the idea of proletarian revolution, these equivalences cannot be purely immediate but imply various mediations such as political parties, theoretical knowledge, and so on. Nevertheless, the three equivalences lie in the background of these mundane activities and guarantee the possibility in principle of a successful revolution.
This account of Lukács’ theory of transforming practice appears congruent with Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation. In his thesis Marcuse must stop short of explicitly drawing the Marxist conclusions toward which his argument tends. He comes close in many passages of Hegel’s Ontology, but he cannot supply the content that would make of his analysis a Marxist analysis. Nevertheless, consider how he might have concretized these remarks on the concept of labor as the underlying structure of Hegelian historicity: “The fundamental element, common to these categories and which has a wide range of reference is the concept of 'activity'. Activity is the living unity of knowing and acting, whereby knowledge means consciousness of self and action, the actual letting happen of the self. Activity is essentially 'transformation' and 'bringing forth.' Every activity ‘aims at’ a transformation; it changes something in the one who performs it’; it turns it around in its present condition; it ‘turns it upside down’….The concept of bringing-oneself-forth further specifies that the life process is concretely a self-manifestation, self-risking and self-assertion”. Lukács’s three equivalences clearly haunt this oh so abstract statement of the case. One imagines Marcuse, with his Berliner’s sense of irony, smiling to himself as he constructed sentences which he could assume would be read very differently by Heidegger than by those who shared his politically sympathies.
Can we go further toward integrating this interpretation of Hegel with Marcuse’s Marxism? The figure of self-consciousness as simultaneously self and social transformation seems to me to underlie all his later thought and to found the early formulations of Critical Theory. Consider, for example, this crucial passage in Horkheimer’s classic essay on “Traditional and Critical Theory”: “In genuinely critical thought explanation signifies not only a logical process but a concrete historical one as well. In the course of it both the social structure as a whole and the relation of the theoretician to society are altered, that is both the subject and the role of thought are changed”. This change, which in Lukács is described as the unity of theory and practice, situates revolution in the place of the absolute.
Modernity is haunted by nostalgia for a simpler world. But it is impossible to return to a Greek notion of totality as objectively given. Now meanings are recognized as human creations. But how then can the gap between the creating subject and the indifferent world be crossed? We left Heidegger in the last lecture struggling to overcome the centripetal force of modernity in a unified conception of being. But the totality lost in the remote Greek past could not be regained either in the depths of Dasein’s being-in-the-world nor in the mythic politics of the Nazi state. Marcuse’s Hegel thesis suggests an alternative path to totality. What is required is a subject that is also essentially an object, a world, and that in deepening its very subjectivity knows itself and transforms itself as such. Such an absolute subject-object would again harmonize existence and idea through self-creation, the ultimate principle of modernity. Hegel offered an approximation to this concept with his notion of the absolute but then veered off into contemplation. Marcuse’s interpretation of the absolute as life corrects the emphasis and steers the dialectic back to the realm of practice.
Here he rejoins Lukács, as we have seen. Lukács’s interpretation of Marxism launched the Hegelianizing approach to revolution that Marcuse tried to combine with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in his early works. The crucial link is the notion that there exists a form of self-consciousness which is both the revelation of a world and the transformation of that world.
Such a conception is incompatible with the conventional understanding of nature in itself as the ultimate reality. Such a nature can perhaps be “revealed” to consciousness and worked on by technique but certainly not transformed by self-consciousness. Now it becomes clear why the problem of nature is unavoidable. The nature in itself of the modern sciences is the correlate of a knowing subject abstracted from reality. A social epistemology may dereify it, but this dereification is not the self-consciousness of an identical subject-object capable of transforming it. Only a dialectic such as that of Lukács, which excludes nature and interprets being as history, can transcend the antinomies of the contemplative relation to reality that derive from the objectivistic standpoint.
Marcuse’s early theory is an extraordinary synthesis of Heidegger and Lukács but it also suffers from their limitations. On the one hand, the abstractness of the Heideggerian conception of Dasein and its care is only partially overcome by reference to the Marxist concept of class. Already in the early 1930s it is becoming clear that class struggle does not drive history all by itself. Marcuse attempts to deepen Marxism by going beyond the conventional emphasis on class interest to a more radical theory of the alienation of labor, but although this helps, it does not go far enough. If revolution is going to unify theory and practice and realize the absolute as a new form of historical motility, another type of motivation will be required. The sources of resistance must be deeper than either workers’ alienation or interests which the system can mask or manipulate. Marcuse will search for that alternative in Freud and aesthetics in his later work.
Then too, there is a serious problem in Lukács’s version of the dialectic of the absolute: he succeeds all too well in distinguishing nature from history. The social world is a network of people and things in intricate patterns that are not easily unraveled. His theory does not explain how nature and society can be cleanly separated in practice, and not just in theory. Lukács’s is clearly critical of the structure of capitalist technology; he sees technology as part of history rather than nature, and yet he has no positive theory of its transformation. But this gap threatens the whole theory. Is it really possible to interpret the coming to self-awareness of a social group engaged in complex technically mediated relations on the model of the immediate unity of subject and object in self-consciousness? This would certainly take some elaborate qualifications if it is possible at all, and yet we do not want to fall uncritically into acceptance of reification in every domain where complex relations between people and things prevail, as does for example, Habermas. Marcuse’s alternative in his later work is to extend the dialectic to technology itself.
Marcuse’s early studies of Aristotle with Heidegger enabled him to address this problem in a different spirit from Lukács. For Marcuse history excludes the abstract nature of the natural sciences but it explicitly includes the whole range of natural relationships and objects touched by human activity such as landscape, environment, and raw materials. As he explains in an early essay, the historical dialectic, applies to all human “creations, deeds and learning, but also nature as an occupied living space and as a power to be used”. These have a dialectical form explored in the “objective dialectic” of thinghood, the lower levels of the dialectic which correspond more or less to the Aristotelian concept of production. Marcuse reconceptualized technical practice socially through the distinction of technê and technology and argued for the transformation of modern technology into a new type of technê based on the potentialities of its objects.
Marcuse's originality in the Marxist tradition appears in his insistence on addressing the questions of class and technology in terms of the power of the imagination. The organized work of the imagination is aesthetic activity, based on aesthetic experience, and it is therefore to aesthetics that Marcuse turns for this constructive dimension of his theory. I will explain this remarkable revision of Marxism in the next lecture.
The Question of Aesthetics
I would like to begin this last lecture by summarizing our course so far. We have seen that the idea of technê in Plato and Aristotle implies an understanding of experience that is radically different from our own modern view. While we tend to separate subject and object, values and facts, the Greeks treated them as a harmonious continuum. Their technical action was not the arbitrary imposition of subjective intentions on mere raw materials, but a mutual engagement with a material world rich in useful potentialities awaiting the facilitating intervention of craft to show themselves. The implicit ontology of ancient craft corresponds to the everyday experience of the world as phenomenology analyses it. The indifferent nature recognized by scientific reason and manipulated by modern technology belongs to a different and derivative dispensation.
Heidegger’s construction of this contrast is powerful and interesting. He is especially good at explaining how the Greeks imposed a limited horizon on the world without superstition or anthropomorphism. They understood things in terms of their potentialities in the framework of human action, specifically production, techne. Their world was thus confined within the parameters of phenomenologically revealed everydayness. Yet they articulated this experience of the world in theoretical terms. What we interpret as their “teleological” standpoint and dismiss for lack of experimental evidence of purposes in things, was in fact their objectivistic way of signifying the necessary bond between man and being, the intrinsic relation between action and world. That they could recognize this bond and this relation while also innovating a scientific reason directed at the objective properties of things was the founding miracle of the West. For us such a paradoxical combination is impossible since we immediately dismiss the bond and the relation in affirming science and objectivity. But they held together these apparent contraries and this made it possible for them to treat things with respect as partners in technical making while also creating the sciences.
This is the lost
In Hegel Marcuse found a way of squaring the circle of
modernity. We are cast out of
But this affirmation is not a task for theory alone. Simply to know that subject and object are bound together in an underlying totality from out of which modern reason springs is insufficient to transform that reason into an instrument of peace and harmony. Marxism finds liberating knowledge not in absolute science but in the proletariat which, as Lukács argued, can transform society in becoming conscious of itself and its role as creative subject of the labor of historical construction. The essential potentialities which the Greeks found in things return here as human potentialities, but since the world is a human creation in some sense, things too are restored in their rights and claims along with the human beings who created them. Exactly in what sense it is possible to argue that labor creates the world and exactly how the rights and claims of things are to be recognized is certainly unclear in the early Lukács and Marcuse. Marcuse’s later work comes closer to a workable theory. He affirms things as “subjects” through a revised concept of technê based on aesthetics, as we will see.
In his early Heideggerian period, Marcuse believed he could found Marxism theoretically in the Hegelian dialectic but he presupposed Marxism itself. The Marxist confidence in a revolutionary alternative was predicated on the notion that workers’ pursuit of economic self-interest would transform them into individuals capable of appropriating and acting on the scientific critique of capitalism. What happens when that confidence is lost, when economic self-interest is no longer allied with critique but with conformism instead? At that point the revolutionary can turn to irrational sources of change such as nationalism or “new gods,” as does Heidegger, or revise the concept of self-interest to enlarge its range beyond the economic sense it has in Marx. Marcuse exemplifies the latter alternative which he pursues by restoring the claims of the aesthetic imagination to a share in the rational comprehension of reality.
Now, aesthetics is surely a strange place to look for a
solution to the problems of modernity. The perception of social reality as
"beautiful" or "ugly" is commonplace, and Marcuse frequently
refers to contemporary instances illustrating his thesis that aesthetics is a
fundamental category of social experience and not confined to the realm of art.
Still, it is clear that aesthetic experience is largely marginalized today, put
out of action when it comes to matters of importance such as technical mastery
of the environment. But Marcuse argues that in a liberated society aesthetic
judgments would become more refined and would claim a significance they usually
lack today. As a consequence, they would be systematically considered in
political and technical decisions. Images of harmony preserved in the imaginary
world of art during millennia of scarcity and strife would serve as criteria
for judging everyday objects and activities. Demands that would have been
absurd in the past would make sense as possible directions of progress. Beyond
interests which can be accommodated to an oppressive society, beyond abstract
universal values, such as freedom and human rights which do not define a
concrete way of life, aesthetics would support a constructive engagement with
political and technical possibilities that might be realized in alternative
configurations of social reality. In this sense, aesthetics can support a new
concept of essential potentialities and a new technology for their concrete
realization.
This incredible inflation of aesthetics in Marcuse's thought has three rather different motives discussed below. In the first place, he needs an experiential basis for identifying potentialities transcending the given. A speculative metaphysics can no longer do the job. Second, he needs a more concrete and imaginatively rich value criterion than morality by which to measure the social world. Even if the advanced industrial society criticized in One-Dimensional Man could meet basic moral standards, it would still constitute a social universe hostile to human beings and nature. And this is related to problems in its technical structure that must be met with aesthetically informed solutions. The "new sensibility" of the New Left began to bring these broadly conceived aesthetic criteria to bear on social life as an alternative to the artificially maintained struggle for existence of the advanced industrial societies. Third, he needs a way of reconceiving technological rationality as an inherently value-laden techne in order to liberate it from subservience to the dominant powers. As we will see, a Kantian moment in the theory is supposed to accomplish this third goal by privileging the role of the imagination, although Marcuse's account of it is rather sketchy. In the remainder of this lecture, I will analyze the three basic concepts that correspond to these purposes: concrete experience; aesthetics; technological rationality.
The Pursuit of the Concrete
Marcuse's recovery of essential thinking offers a place to
stand to judge a society obsessed with wealth and power, but it also raises the
question of the foundation of his judgments. There is no easy way out through
an appeal to Marxist social theory, conceived as Marx conceived it, as a kind
of "counter-science." Although Marcuse makes such an appeal, he
admits its weakness in advance. The problem has to do with the structure of the
materialist dialectic which grounds all transcending concepts in the tensions
of existing reality rather than in a supersensuous
realm of ideals. As these struggles weaken in advanced industrial society, a
gap grows between concrete reality with its internal tensions and the vision of
a better society. In Marx that gap is destined to disappear as theory becomes
consciousness and philosophical speculation enters the real world as mass
politics. The early Marxist Lukács called this concretization of the ideal
"the unity of theory and practice." In a 1929 essay much influenced
by Lukács, Marcuse describes that unity as "the supreme exigency of all
philosophizing".
But in the early 1960s, when Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, the unity of theory
and practice appeared to be permanently lost. Hence the pessimistic tone of
much of that book; Marcuse was forced to concede that the derivation of
potentialities might have to proceed negatively, on purely philosophical
grounds, as a diagnosis of the massive private distress and public squalor
produced by a repressive society that had integrated all opposing forces. But
at this point the gap between the amorphous resistances or symptoms of distress
and articulated values threatens the whole theory. What can verify the
diagnosis if not the voice of the victims? Without their assent, what
distinguishes the philosophical analysis from the mere discontent of a
beautiful soul? That Marcuse was well aware of this danger is evidenced by this
personal detail: on the wall of his dining room in
Marcuse's turn to aesthetics for an answer has seemed inexplicable to his critics, but it makes sense in terms of this background. In fact, Marcuse's argument is rooted not in the study of anti-capitalist struggle but in the history of the artistic avant gardes. His technical aesthetic attempts to recapitulate the missed turning point in the development of modernism when radical experiments in overcoming the split between life and art proliferated in the first years of the century. That moment, which preceded the conquest of the masses by commercial culture, projected a concrete utopia that reappeared in the 1960s in manifestations of a new sensibility. On Marcuse's view, only a return to the promise of those early avant gardes can release technological civilization from the bind in which it is caught. It was the public expression of utopian impulses in the New Left and the counter-culture that grounded Marcuse's reference to a democratic transformation of advanced industrial society. These movements marked the emergence on a mass scale of transcendent demands rooted in aesthetic experience.
The reference to experience is crucial for Marcuse's project
insofar as he seeks to construct a rational critique of modernity. Modern
thought defines itself by its rejection of authority and dogma, by its basis in
the experience of the autonomous individual. Science claims its foundation in
the carefully observed evidence of empirical experience. If there is anything
that science does not explain, i.e. if philosophical critique still has an
object, it must be verifiable in a different type of experience. The existential
interpretation of experience appeared in the 1920s, not just to Marcuse but to
many other philosophers as well, as a specifically modern response to
naturalistic scientism and neo-Kantianism. Experiential thinking offered a way
of recovering essential insight without lapsing into premodern dogmatism.
Unfortunately, the terms on which Marcuse developed his argument from experience have not stood the test of time very well. He started out by announcing the idea of a "concrete philosophy" founded in individual existence, Dasein, and I would argue, he never entirely abandoned this approach although the Heideggerian reference was quickly dropped. The concrete appears here as the activity of the existential subject, itself constituted within a "world" in Heidegger's sense. But unlike Heidegger Marcuse situates that world in the flow of a Marxist interpretation of history. The worldhood of this world therefore includes political struggle as an essential moment. The problem is to find an authentic, i.e. philosophical, politics capable of articulating the situation of contemporary Dasein. Following Lukács, Marcuse interprets that politics in terms of the concepts of reification and the unity of theory and practice. All Marcuse's later attempts to reach the concrete, through such concepts as the "new sensibility," sensuousness, the aesthetic, the instincts, resonate with the echoes of this original existential approach.
As we have seen, Marcuse’s Hegel thesis first attempted to work out the alternative to Heidegger’s vague eschatology in terms of a conception of life as concretely historical. Life resembles Heidegger’s Dasein in seeking its unity and wholeness through a future oriented construction of its own potentialities. Yet it differs too in that the expression of its “care” in work and world leads to objectification and mutual recognition, themes entirely absent from Heidegger’s existential analytic. Life has an essentializing motility that promises revolutionary social change. Marcuse reconstructs the notion of the human essence in Hegelian terms, as self-conscious unity of self, community, and world, and on this basis he shows that it can only be realized through overcoming the alienation of the worker under capitalism. The equivalent of authenticity now appears as the demand for dereification and liberation.
The Hegelian concept of life advances Marcuse toward his
goal of reconstructing the concept of essence, but it is closely tied to a
rather traditional Marxist politics which cannot survive the triumph of fascism
and the emergence of consumer society after the War. These problems are
addressed after Marcuse joins the
The link between Marcuse’s early Hegel and later Freud interpretations appears implicitly in Eros and Civilization. There Marcuse recasts the Hegelian idea of life in terms of Freud’s metapsychology. With Freud Marcuse describes the affirmation of life in peace and reconciliation as rooted in a libidinal attachment to the world, a sort of generalized erotics. The death instinct is mobilized in the struggle for survival and takes exaggerated forms in competition, violence, and aggression. The balance between the instincts is historically relative. The great wealth of modern societies could tip that balance in favor of life if obsolete institutions, technologies, and character structures were transformed.
Following Freud, Marcuse grounds the aesthetic in Eros.
Beauty is identified here with that which is "life-enhancing."
"For the aesthetic needs have their own social content: they are the
claims of the human organism, mind and body, for a dimension of fulfillment"
denied by the established society. The "ugliness" of modern societies
is not merely unsatisfying to the senses of sight and hearing but offends
against the "life instincts," i.e. against a wide range of needs that
cannot be channeled into profit-making enterprise or war. Erotic liberation in
a technically advanced society is not about how to have fun, as supercilious
critics have charged, but far more seriously concerns reconstructing modern
technology to accommodate it to the enhancement of life rather than the
struggle for existence.
This is Marcuse's radical extrapolation from Marx's claim
that at the end of the capitalist era, social advance would be a condition for
technical advance. But traditional Marxism reduced this original Marxian idea
to a complaint that capitalist society makes a bad use of technology. On
Marcuse's account modern technology cannot simply be "used" to
realize radical ends. The logic of its normal operations contradicts them. What
sense would it make to try to turn the assembly line into a scene of self-expression,
or to broadcast propaganda for free thought? The systemic character of modern
technology blocks recourse to it for these purposes. Technology has a logic of
its own independent of the goals it serves. To the extent that this is true,
merely changing goals would not change that logic, which is the source of the
ultimate threat.
To make a difference at that level, not just the ends of
production, but the means must be transformed insofar as they incorporate
domination in their structure. A true alternative would change the material
base as well as the institutional superstructures. A postrevolutionary society
could create a new science and technology which would achieve this goal and
place us in harmony rather than in conflict with nature. The new science and
technology would treat nature as another subject instead of as mere raw
materials. Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through realizing
nature's inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste for the sake of
power and profit. Marcuse writes,
Freedom indeed depends
largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact
easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of
freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction
and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new
sensibility—the demands of the life instincts. Then one could speak of a
technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project
and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil.
This emphasis on technical transformation distinguishes
Marcuse from both Heidegger and the rest of the
In Marcuse, criteria of social advance such as reducing instinctual repression are not grounded on scientific biology or derived from an ideal of man, but are reflections of historical struggles and artistic and philosophic projections. Notions like the "reality principle" and the "pleasure principle" are thoroughly historicized in Marcuse's application. As Robert Pippin writes, "far from smuggling an a priori anthropology into critical theory (as readers of Marcuse sometimes charge), [he] argued that even the instincts should be viewed as historical phenomena". All that can be traced back to a realm prior to history is a primordial energy that expresses itself in socially constructed forms under the horizon of the society that originally shaped it, and also, under certain conditions, beyond that horizon.
Marcuse's theory is thus a deconstruction of the reified opposition
of nature and culture that first emerged in the sophistic discourse of ancient
This similarity suggests an implicit phenomenological basis for Marcuse's attempts to relativize the nature/culture distinction in his later work. Indeed, concrete practice does not presuppose that distinction as the phenomenological analysis shows. The analysis follows everyday action itself, which finds such supposedly cultural phenomena as "values" in the structure of its objects rather than in the mental habits of the subject. Thus phenomenologically considered, goodness inheres in the apple pie, and is no "investment" of a subjective preference in a value neutral thing. Like action itself, phenomenology engages with the world as a unified whole. Reality is only decomposed into nature and culture abstractly, theoretically, after action has ceased. Heidegger discovered their unity in Aristotle’s concept of technê and Marcuse now repeats that basic insight in terms of aesthetic experience. But although in his later work Marcuse remains within that phenomenological framework, he no longer articulates its premises. As a result his speculations on the relations of nature and culture are suspended, so to speak, between objectivity and subjectivity, not a comfortable place for a philosophical theory.
Nevertheless, it should be clear that Marcuse's approach does avoid naturalism. It may still be unacceptable to postmoderns convinced (in a sad caricature of Derrida) that history is a superficial "play of signifiers," but postmodern irony misses any sense of the first person experience of participation in history under the pressure of human passions and the unavoidable demands of the present. Some postmodern and feminist discourse introduces that dimension anew through a focus on the body. Marcuse would no doubt have found these reflections interesting. For him the existential significance of history was an undeniable aspect of the human condition and had to be conceptualized somehow. As he himself said of Freud, so for Marcuse, "'biologism' is social theory in a depth dimension". One might reject biological language as inappropriate without losing sight of that dimension.
Marcuse's pursuit of the concrete raises as many problems as
it solves. On the one hand, it grounds the argument in experience, a
potentially universal domain in which all can participate and which can support
a rational discourse. On the other hand, it valorizes one of the dimensions of
experience that is most difficult to universalize rationally, art. Is Marcuse's
aestheticism compatible with democracy? As Habermas has so persuasively argued,
democratic public reason is an intersubjective process, but insofar as the
aesthetic is an experiential reality disclosed to an attuned sensibility, it
appears to be private. The idea of beauty individualizes the encounter with the
aesthetic as a higher truth available only to the happy few.
Like so many interpretive difficulties with Marcuse, this
one results from the dialectical "compression" of theoretical levels
that is his working method. Marcuse's aesthetics attempts to build a bridge between
three quite different phenomena: the sensibility of the New Left, which he interprets
in Freudian terms as a recovery and release of erotic energies, the concept of
beauty, which he relates to the history of art, and Kant's theory of the
imagination. The constellation formed by these elements raises the exciting but
rather marginal cultural innovations of the 1960s to the level of a
worldhistorical experiment in the political realization of artistic ideals.
There are obvious problems with this view, but focusing on them may cause us to
overlook what is still interesting in Marcuse's theory, namely his aesthetic approach
to the politics of technology.
Walter Benjamin introduced the theme of the
"aestheticization of politics" in a critique of Ernst Jünger's
writings on modern war. It was been widely assumed ever since that there is some
essential connection between aestheticization and fascism, to which Jünger was
attracted. But Martin Jay points out that there are also progressive
interpretations of the aestheticization of politics, for example in Hannah Arendt's
writings on Kant's aesthetic theory. Arendt attempted to show that what Kant
called "reflective judgment" can be generalized from art to politics.
Political judgment on this account is properly doxic rather than epistemic, a
matter of opinion rather than knowledge, based on the imagination rather than
on understanding, and precisely in this apparent deficiency lies its link to
our freedom. Political judgment is not scientific but it contains an appeal to
the other for agreement. It is thus neither universally valid nor merely personal,
but constructs an intersubjective bond through a special type of rational
discourse.
To this example of a progressive aestheticization of
politics cited by Jay, we can add Marcuse's radical politics of technological
transformation There is in fact a
certain similarity between his project and that of Arendt. Is it a coincidence
that both these Heidegger students affirm the disclosive power of art and
attempt to transpose it to the political domain by drawing on Kant's third Critique? Where Arendt found a model of
political judgment in Kant's theory of the imagination, Marcuse took the more
radical route of applying that theory to technology, which he conceived as
political in advanced societies. This is a seemingly paradoxical approach:
after all, isn't the technical precisely the most rigorous application of conceptual
understanding? Isn’t it the very opposite of the imagination?
Like Heidegger Marcuse sees technology as more than
technical, as more even than political; it is the form of modern experience
itself, the principal way in which the world is revealed. For both philosophers
"technology" thus extends its reach far beyond the bounds of actual devices.
It signifies a way of thinking and a style of practice involving a
quasi-transcendental structuring of reality as an object of technical control.
Release from this form of experience can only come through another form of
experience. In Heideggerian terms, as Hubert Dreyfus explains them, Marcuse
calls for a new disclosure of being through a transformation of basic practices.
Marcuse's aesthetics does not just introduce a criterion of beauty into radical
political judgments, but describes the apriori form of a new type of experience
belonging to a new social order.
An Essay on Liberation
contains Marcuse's most radical discussion of the aesthetics of technology. There he argues that the weakening
grip of one-dimensional society explains the emergence of "new needs"
in the New Left counter-culture. It was not just that young people held radical
political opinions. Mere opinions would have inspired readily cooptable demands for particular reforms within the system,
not a bad thing, but not revolutionary either. The "new sensibility"
operated at a more basic level than politics, at the level of the form of
experience itself. Marcuse's notion of an "aesthetic Lebenswelt" refers to an order of experience in which the
aesthetic qualities of objects are revealed. Through the New Left the aesthetic
Lebenswelt entered everyday life
itself as the form of perception, with revolutionary implications. This is the
Marcusean equivalent of a Heideggerian “new beginning,” a radical dispensation
breaking through the reified surface of a technological society.
To this aestheticized experience corresponds a new organization
of the faculties. Here Marcuse draws on a rather speculative historical
critique of the positivistic limitations of modern thought shared by many
According to this theory, the original mode of experience
was more primitive but in some respects richer than the restricted experience
that emerges with class society. Capable in principle of responding to the
objective world in its many dimensions, in practice reason and sensibility are
now limited to a narrow range of values associated with the struggle for
survival. Experiential contents that go beyond what is required for victory in
that struggle are derealized and treated as mere fantasy. The realm of art was
differentiated out as the imagination and reason split apart in this context.
Reason became technical while the imagination conserved counterfactual images
of a harmonious world, a persistent negativity that was safely confined to a
marginal artistic realm. The recovery of a richer concept of reason
incorporating the imagination is possible once again now that the struggle for
existence is essentially over, ended by technological advance.
Marcuse turns to Kant for an approach to the impact of social liberation on the faculties. In Kant's third Critique, the gap between the abstract universal categories of the understanding and the chaotic variety of raw sense experience is filled by the imagination. The imagination mediates between the senses and reason, raising sense experience to universality while bringing concepts down to earth as the organizing principles of its projections. The eidos returns in this form as the meanings of beings, binding the general and the particular together in the specific type of each thing. This transcendental function of the imagination is obviously derived from the model of art but it paints not just the canvas but all of experience.
There is clearly a need for a function like that which Kant attributes to the imagination, but his theory has a significant limitation: his imagination is a speculative construct and so has no independent role in shaping experience. It plays its role only after the fact in the analysis of experience, and does not appear in the world of historical action in which experience is itself constructed.
With the abolition of scarcity in advanced societies, the
work of the really existing imagination active in artistic production can overflow
the boundaries of art to occupy the place of the Kantian transcendental
imagination. This is one way of interpreting the project of the artistic avant
gardes, which attempted at an early date to abolish the institution of art in
order to realize its principles in everyday life. Responding to the revolt of
the repressed sensibility, the New Left "invokes the sensuous power of the
imagination" and projects a fundamental reorganization of the faculties.
From its marginal position the imagination moves to the center of the stage as
the integrative faculty reconciling the demands of sense and reason. The
imagination organizes the heterogeneous contents of the aestheticized
experience of the new sensibility into a coherent whole. In a liberated society
it would become "productive" in reality, like the imagination of the
artistic creator, and guide technical practice in the work of "pacifying
existence."
A transformed reason "free for the liberating
exigencies of the imagination," arrives at very different ways of understanding
and mastering the world. Such a reason perceives potentialities as concrete
contents of the structure of the objects themselves, as potentialities of those objects, and not as arbitrary
desires or wishes of subjects. These contents are available through imaginatively
informed aesthetic judgments of social reality and are not subjective goals to
be sought with appropriate technical means. Here we have the aestheticized
essences at the basis of a modern techne.
How are they apprehended in aesthetic experience? This is
the question of what Heidegger called “productive seeing,” which Marcuse will
treat as the mode of abstraction appropriate to a modern reconstruction of the
concept of essence. Once metaphysics and tradition are ruled out of order, it
is only through the imaginative grasp of reality that reason can go beyond mere
cataloguing and quantifying of objects toward an appreciation of their
essential truth. Reflection on aesthetic experience supports a type of judgment
that can identify the significant "Form" of reality, distinguishing
essence from accident, higher potentiality from limited empirical existence.
Following Hegel, Marcuse calls this abstractive act associated with aesthetic
perception an "aesthetic reduction". It consists in stripping away
the contingent aspects of objects that restrict and stunt them in order to get
at what they could be if released to their free development. The aesthetic
reduction carries the dialectical theory of essence beyond theory; it verifies
at the theoretical level the claims of aesthetic experience and translates that
experience into positive images. Here beauty is the symbol of the good, the
disclosure of being in its fullness.
Does it matter that the "essences" posited by this
new technological rationality would be scientifically groundless, that they
would be selected by the "productive imagination" from a whole range
of possibilities on the basis of a value judgment, a preference for human
freedom and fulfillment, the affirmation of life? No doubt Marcuse's theory
would be more sympathetically received today had he avoided the language of
essence altogether and either invoked a transcendental ground for values à la
Habermas, or the freedom of the postmodern subject willfully to construct
identities and realities.
If he rejected both of these alternatives, I believe it is
because he was faithful to a fundamental insight of the Frankfurt School: the
subjective reason of the existing technological rationality and the objective
reason of essential insight are not opposites or alternatives but fractured moments
of a totality that can only be anticipated today. Horkheimer thus writes that
"The task of philosophy is not stubbornly to play the one against the
other, but to foster a mutual critique and thus, if possible, to prepare in the
intellectual realm the reconciliation of the two in reality”. This conception,
with its faith that we can find traces of the ideal in the real, could not be
further from the over-burdened subjectivity of both transcendentalism and
constructivism. It is true that where Horkheimer, like Adorno, remained
stubbornly bound to a negative dialectic, a pure critique, Marcuse transgressed
that limitation and constructed positive images of liberation. But he remained
within the larger framework of the
This distinguishes his position also from that of Habermas,
who reverses the older
Marcuse concludes that aesthetics would be the basis of a new concept of reason that would merge art and technique. A new form of technological rationality would be oriented toward the enhancement of life, the telos of the aesthetic. "The rationality of art, its ability to 'project' existence, to define yet unrealized possibilities could then be envisaged as validated by and functioning in the scientific-technological transformation of the world". Here is how Marcuse describes it:
The liberated consciousness would promote the
development of a science and technology free to discover and realize the possibilities
of things and men in the protection and gratification of life, playing with the
potentialities of form and matter for the attainment of this goal. Technique
would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the
opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic
and scientific thought, would be invalidated. Emergence of a new Reality Principle: under which a new sensibility and
a desublimated scientific intelligence would combine
in the creation of an aesthetic ethos.
Technological Rationality
Marcuse's argument culminates in the notion of a radical
change in technological rationality. But the very concept of technological
rationality is obscure. A commonplace reading stemming from Habermas identifies
Marcuse's notion with the generic interest in technical control, abstract
efficiency. On that reading, fundamental technological reform of the sort
Marcuse anticipates would be impossible, violating a basic condition of human
existence. Others have argued that in the end Marcuse's position amounts to
little more than a rhetorically ornamented technophilia.
On these terms, we are left with the choice between two
unacceptable interpretations of Marcuse's thought: either his critique of
technological rationality implies the need for an entirely new kind of technology
that would not involve control and efficiency at all, a nonsensical idea, or he
merely wrote in a confusing way about the need to apply technological control
and efficiency to new purposes, a trivial idea.
1) If the new aestheticized technology is based on
completely new technical principles, then the whole theory is unbelievable. Who
is going to invent those principles, and what will they be like? Although it
sometimes sounds as though Marcuse intends a total break with the past, the
revolution that interested him was not supposed to refute elementary
arithmetic, change a decimal place in pi,
or find aesthetically pleasing substitutes for the lever and the wheel. Nor
would it, as Habermas suggested, require personal communication with nature
rather than technical control of it. Marcuse did not believe it possible to replace
technology as we know it with some sort of mystical union.
2) Perhaps Marcuse had more modest ambitions and merely
hoped that technology would be used to
enhance rather than to destroy life. But if he intended nothing more innovative
than this, it is difficult to figure out how practically his position differs from a simple change of goals. Of
course we could make toys and medicine instead of weapons, but would that
require truly fundamental technological
change? If the new technology is simply a new application of the old
technology, then it is difficult to see what all the hoopla is about. Indeed,
on this interpretation Marcuse's position is indistinguishable from ordinary
technological optimism, with its all too familiar technocratic implications.
But Marcuse himself consistently talks in terms of the need for a change in rationality and not merely in applications.
This is the Marcusean enigma that has bedeviled his critics.
I want to suggest a different interpretation that, while it deflates Marcuse's
speculative ambitions somewhat, at least does not take him for a dreamer, and
that accords with his own emphasis on the importance of situating abstract
concepts like "rationality" in a concrete social context. The space
in between these two flawed interpretations corresponds more or less to what is
called "technical culture," the cultural universe of technical work
itself. Applications are not designed in function of abstract technical
principles alone but emerge from concrete technical disciplines. Naturally,
those disciplines incorporate technical principles, but they include much
besides. As social institutions, they operate under various types of constraints
which influence their formulation of technical problems and solutions and show
up in the applications they design. Technical principles only become
historically active through such a culture of technology.
Unfortunately, Marcuse never developed concepts at this
concrete sociological level, but nothing prevents us from pursuing his argument
in this context. Then it appears that
the most important referent of his concept of "technological
rationality" is fundamental social imperatives in the form in which they are internalized by a technical culture.
Such fundamental imperatives tie technology not just to a particular local
experience but to consistent features of basic social formations such as
ancient society, capitalism, socialism. They are the “technological apriori”
embodied in the devices and systems that emerge from the culture and reinforce
its basic values. In this sense technology can be said to be
"political" without mystification or risk of confusion.
Marcuse's theory makes sense conceived on these terms. At the level of the concrete historical forms of technical culture, there is room for a variety of different rationalities, and it is up to us to judge between them and chose the best. Environmentalism has allowed us to give a concrete content to this notion, as Marcuse himself noted at the end of his life. A technological rationality oriented toward the long-term preservation and enhancement of human life and non-human nature contrasts sharply with one oriented toward competition for control of resources and short-term exploitation.
This is a significant difference which liberal political
philosophy ignores insofar as it is focused on procedural notions of democratic
rights. The exclusion of technology from consideration, along with many other
concrete issues, blocks normative judgment of one of the most important
influences on the shape of social life. In recent years some philosophers have
noted the poverty of this liberal view. They point out that it fails to take
into account the claims of community values through which peoples achieve collective
self-definition. This critique of proceduralism has merit, but since technology
everywhere trumps tradition communitarians must ignore it to make their point.
In this they are at one with liberalism and like it they offer at most a
marginal contribution to an understanding of politics today. I do not think
Marcuse would have sympathized with it in any case. It would have made no sense
to him to go back to the tight restrictions of traditional community at the current
level of development. It is possible and necessary to go forward toward a
greater measure of peace, freedom, and fulfillment. To be sure, there are
problems with invoking the aesthetic as a future oriented approach to supplying
substance to procedural democracy. But interpreted in the broad terms of a
theory of the social imagination, Marcuse's approach offers a properly modern
solution to the conundrum. Perhaps in this way we can realize more liberating
projects than those of either tradition or business.
I suggest that Marcuse's notion of an aesthetic criterion
for the new technical logos be reinterpreted
as an attempt to articulate such a substantive democratic conception. In this
context aesthetics is not a matter of contemplation, but should be interpreted
in classical terms as an ontological category, expressing the reflexive
significance for the actors' existence of their own actions. In Socrates' myth
of the
How plausible is Marcuse's project? It is easy to dismiss
his aesthetic reference in the name of standard notions of discursive
rationality and argument. This seems to be the line taken by most critical theorists
under the influence of Habermas. However, the result is an incredibly thin
notion of political philosophy more or less identified with argument over moral
rights. This is no way to comprehend the complexity of modern social life and
the political debates to which it gives rise. Attempts to fill in the picture
with a complementary idea of the "good" fall back on mere traditionalism.
Must we conclude that contemporary Critical Theory considers creative responses
to political and social problems to be irredeemably irrational? It is precisely
a theory of the rationality of such responses which Marcuse offers in a
strained but nevertheless suggestive attempt to understand the political and
social creativity of the 1960s.
Nor is Marcuse's project so impractical as his very abstract
language makes it appear. At one point, he mentions "gardens and parks and
reservations" as a small example of the "liberating transformation"
he awaits. More generally, I think we already have weak versions of modern technai in such fields as medicine,
architecture, and urban and environmental planning. Technical cultures based to
a significant degree on life enhancing values derived from a wide range of
experiences contend in these fields with narrow technocratic ambitions and commercialism.
Each of these disciplines posits an idealized essence, such as health, the
home, the urban ideal, the natural balance. Democracy requires the public discussion
and refinement of these ideals in a context freed from propaganda, business
influence, and technocratic and determinist ideology. This is not yet possible,
but despite the obvious limitations of these disciplines, they offer at least
an imperfect model for the new technological rationality Marcuse advocates.
Generalizing this form of technological rationality and controlling it through
democratic political debate is no mere fantasy but a concrete project of
resistance to techno-corporate power.
It is true that today this Marcusean hope appears even less
politically plausible than in his lifetime, yet if one rejects it, one should
be prepared to offer another solution. For, the question of the age remains the
one he addressed. Let me reformulate it in conclusion: how can technology
incorporate humane values rather than hurtling blindly forward under the
momentum of an inherited technical system shaped by scarcities and struggles
that can now be overcome in the rich and powerful society technology itself has
created?